Fake Game Developer Claims to be Former Pragmatic Play Employee

Over the last few months we’ve published a couple of articles covering the growing prevalence of counterfeit games and the prevalence of fake games on black market casino sites. Through our network of connections new information has come to light which we will discuss here.

Fake games are exactly what they sound like – copies of genuine providers’ games, made without their permission, distributed without license or testing. They are created by people/companies that operate out of jurisdictions where it is extremely challenging to reach them legally.

And most importantly, they represent a huge threat to player.

How can fake games be dangerous for players? Surely they’re just like a off-brand version of the same product? Like you see with cornflakes in super markets?

Setting aside that these aren’t similar but distinct copies of the real games, and that they are absolutely breaking the law by hijacking the owners’ copyright, these games are untested by approved testing labs and are not subject to any regulatory oversight. This may not be something that players think about on a day-to-day basis, but it represents a huge risk.

The practical realities of untested games is that they are not confirmed to function to any published standard.

Let’s explore some of the ways that this can be exploited to cheat and defraud players:

i) RTP Settings – This simplest way that a fake game provider can cheat players is to tamper with the Return to Player (RTP) settings.

Legitimate game developers have to submit their games to regulator approved testing labs. These testing labs confirm that the games in question return at the stated levels. Whilst each game may have a number of possible RTP settings, the advertised settings will always correspond to the actual RTP. This means that players can quickly and easily see if the operator changes the RTP setting, by looking at the game paytable or help file.

This is NOT the case with fake games, where the advertised RTP is used to intentionally mislead players. In fact these game developers actively advertise this as a incentive to their casino clients:

Fake games are designed specifically to defraud players by misleading them about the real disadvantage they are playing at.

ii) Free to Play – Any regulated operator or software provider is required to ensure that their demo games function to the same settings as their real to play games. But the fake game distributors are under no such restrictions. So where fake games are offered it would be trivial for the free games to return at a rate of over 100%, whilst the real play games are set to a rate of well below 100%.

iii) Streamers – Similar to free to play games, there’s nothing to stop fake game developers providing free-to-play games that look like real play games for slot streamers. In fact we can confirm via the advertising materials we have seen that this is happening:

The only reason that a game developer would want to offer revenue share free accounts for streamers is because the play on the accounts is not real and the operator isn’t generating revenue from it.

But the rig doesn’t have to end with free play streamers pretending they’re playing with real funds to mislead their audiences. It would be easy to provide streamers with a game set to pay out over 100%, so the streamer shows themselves winning at an accelerated rate, encouraging their audience to risk real money, whilst the games that the players that the streamer refers are subject to catastrophic RTPs.

iv) Bait and Switch – Another practice that we’ve heard from reliable sources is occurring is operators offering the genuine game for the majority of players, but switching in a counterfeit game for specific high value players, having the game switch from real to fake when the player crosses a predefined wager size, or even having financial targets where the game switches from real to fake if the player gets ahead by a specific amount.

Effectively every fear that a player has ever had about the operator being able to control the outcome of their wagers can occur when fake games are deployed.

Someone in our team’s network recently reached out to us with a communication they’d received from a fake game developer that shed new light on the practices going on within these illegal game thieves:

This provider is actively advertising games that can be set to an RTP of 0%.

We had heard from sources we trust within the industry that they had identified some casinos distributing fake games have been using RTP settings as low as 20%, a quarter of the lowest level that any well regulated operator would be allowed to use. But 0% is an entirely different beast. This is no longer gambling at all. These “games” are just players paying a fee to watch the reels spin.

And this validates the concern highlighted above in the ‘Bait and Switch’ section. The casino can adjust the settings and it is now absolutely possible for them to track players in real time and set the game to no chance of winning when the player is ahead, or when they place a large wager.

We dug further into this and tracked back the Telegram account that was included in the promotional email. In this Telegram account we found identical images, messages and videos to another account that we identified in Case 1 of this report.

A very similar name was used, and this time we found this:

So this group are claiming that their founder formerly worked for Pragmatic Play and that the code for their games has been stolen from the genuine providers. That doesn’t necessarily mean that these claims are true, but it does align with rumours we’ve heard within the sector.

If this is the same group we identified in our previous report, Pragmatic Play clearly had success in getting their first site removed. They’ve popped back up and are doing the same thing again, demonstrating how difficult it is to stop these criminals.

The inclusion of 0% RTP setting evidences clearly that these groups aren’t simply market disruptors, trying to deliver a quality, cheaper alternatives to the big name software provider companies. There is clear and explicit intention to facilitate the large scale defrauding of players. These are amoral, criminal operations at every level, from how they acquire their product, to their infringement of IP, to how they intend their product to be used.