The Fake Contagion – Game Fakers Ripping-Off Players and Software Developers

Are the games you play fair? We all know that the casino has a built in edge. That players are expected to lose in the long run. Most players, most people, understand that. But are the games you play fair? Do they perform to the standards and return settings they advertise?

The nature of gambling games makes it very challenging for an individual player to assess the fairness of the outcomes they experience, but there is a whole segment of the industry that is dedicated to ensuring that gambling games are fair. From regulators, to testing labs to advertising oversight bodies, there are layer upon layer of organisations that are intended to ensure that the games you play online operate strictly as advertised.

So broadly speaking, whilst it may not always feel this way, the games that you play online are fair.

Except…

In recent years there’s been a growing proliferation of fake games. What do I mean by “fake”? I mean a copy of a genuine game. It looks like your favorite NetEnt, Playtech, Novomatic or Pragmatic Play game. But it wasn’t produced by these companies. The developer has stolen the intellectual property of the company that produced the game and draped this skin over their own game engine. A game engine that is subject to none of the checks or tests that ensures that the original game functions in a fair manner.

And these cheaters and fakers are getting more and more blatant in their practices. In the second half of 2024 the CasinoReviews.com team has come into contact with two fake game distributors that are marketing their wares at a level we’ve never encountered before.

We were recently contacted by one of these disreputable organisations via email. The vendor was trying to reach two of our ADR clients and had obviously found our email address in the terms and conditions section of our clients’ websites, amongst the information that they provide on their ADR. The communication we received verifies several assumptions about the operation of these games that we’ve always presumed to be true and which we’ll discuss below.

This contact was offering to switch-out legitimate Pragmatic Play games for fake versions of the same games. The email promoted the advantages of these fake games:

So let’s break down what these claims actually mean:

Free set-up in 2 hours:

Self-explanatory – they’re suggesting that they can switch out real Pragmatic Play games for their fake versions very quickly.

Custom RTPs:

Legitimate Pragmatic Play games generally come with a low, middle and high RTP setting, allowing the operator to choose which game setting they want to offer. For that reason it’s a good idea for to check within the game paytable to ensure you’re playing at a casino that offers the highest RTP setting for the game you want to play (you’ll make it more likely that you’ll lose less in the long run).

What they do not offer is customizable RTPs. The operator cannot decide what they want the RTP to be. Viewed in the most favourable way, this could be suggesting that they offer the same 3 RTP settings. But the implication is clearly more than that and this leads into the next claim…


Players Will Win Less Without Noticing:

This statement is our smoking gun. The only way that players would win less often “without noticing the difference” is if the difference is hidden from them, i.e. the actual RTP figures which all legitimate Pragmatic Play games clearly advertise are not the figures being used by the game itself.

This confirms that these fake games aren’t simply copies of the legitimate games being distributed by unauthorized providers. They are skins of the original game, with a new engine behind it specifically set-up to ensure that players will lose more and faster.


Lower Revenue Share:

Often the contract between a gambling operator and a game supplier will be based on a revenue share agreement. The game supplier will receive a percentage cut of the revenue generated by their games for the gambling operator.

This fake game provider is simply looking to undercut Pragmatic Play, offering their versions of the Pragmatic Play games for a lower cost than the real games.


Revenue Share Free Access for Streamers:

This is an interesting statement that reveals information about something otherwise unrelated to our case, but that nonetheless is something that the industry generally doesn’t want to talk about: streamers.

For those not familiar with streamers, these are people that advertise for casinos by live streaming their gaming sessions. They include affiliate links in their profile so the thousands of people that are watching their channel while they play can sign-up to the casino they’re playing at, earning the streamer a commission.

The thing about it is, streamers tend to play at obscene bets sizes. Bet sizes that should be unsustainable even with their referral commissions. Bet sizes that are intended to encourage their users to think about that potentially life changing win and to take outsized risks when they play. Which brings us back to the topic we’re discussing here.

It has long been my view, and the view of most knowledgeable people in the sector, that these streamers aren’t playing with real money. Either they’re being heavily subsidized with bonus funds or they’re playing with entirely fake balances.

Allowing streamers to play with fake money at high stakes would cost the operator a fortune if they had to pay revenue share on the fake profit to the game provider. As such to allow streamers to play with free play funds there would have to be an agreement with the software provider that the streamer’s play would not be subject to the revenue share agreement. Which is exactly what this group is advertising.

So what else can we find out about this group?

Website

Some google searches turned up a website that appears to be marketing the same product:

We’ve redacted the above image heavily to prevent exact match term searches turning up this website, but there’s enough there to see the matching claims: Pragmatic Play games, 2 hours implementation, 4% rev share.

What’s surprising about this is that up until recently, trade in these sorts of fake games has been very much kept behind closed doors. Neither the distributors of these games, nor the operators using them wanted this information out in the open. They wanted to pretend as far as possible that these were legitimate games.

Under the closed door model email marketing would be risky: if an unintended recipient like us were to receive the email, it could draw unwanted attention. But a publicly available website makes clear that this group at least is no longer making any efforts to stay in the shadows and is comfortable openly promoting itself. This infringement and effort to defraud players en masse is as brazen as brazen can be.

Looking this site up on Wayback Machine, it appears to have come online only in April 2024:

Looking up the WhoIs information for this website reveals that this website was registered on the 12th of April 2024 via Russian domain registrar and domain ownership privacy service Nic.ru:

This aligns with what I’ve heard from a variety of sources around the sector, that these fake game developers have been operating out of Russia.

Social Media

If we search the Telegram ID or the WhatsApp number that were provided in the email we received, it also pulls up this result:

For those outside of Russia VK.com, or VKontakte, is a Russian social media site. Effectively the Russian equivalent of Facebook. To give some context of the popularity of this platform within Russia, more messages are exchanged between users on VK.com each month than the next 8 most popular social media sites combined:

-https://www.statista.com/statistics/284447/social-media-platforms-by-publications-russia/

This account appears to have become active in July 2024. So the sales team for this fake game distributor has started actively marketing on social media and we can again see the relationship to Russia.

And if we look-up this user handle in Telegram we find a series of videos and pictures posted to the users profile, from the Pragmatic Play stand at SiGMA Sao Paulo in April this year:

That’s right, they specifically sought out the Pragmatic Play stands at a conference to take pictures to market their parasitical rip-offs of Pragmatic Play games.

Partners

The website that this group has put together contained another surprise: they were actively promoting operators that were distributing their fake games:

The brands that are included on this site are:

Hannibalbet.net
CrazyWin365.com
Legionwin.com
Totofa.com

In all fairness, the owners of this website could have simply put these brands’ logos on their site without permission. However, inspection of these four operator’s websites allows us to confirm that all four are offering fake versions of other software providers games, and at least one appears to be falsely claiming a Curacao license, meaning that the Pragmatic Play games offered on these sites are almost certainly fake.

It should be noted that between the point of us contacting Pragmatic Play with the unredacted versions of the information shown in this article and the publication of this article, the website in question has gone offline. We assume that Pragmatic Play have been successful in shutting this group down. Or at least shutting their website down.

While we were still working on this article and speaking to the involved parties, we received a second contact from a different group, this time via a direct message on LinkedIn:

In another step forward in terms of the brazenness of operation of these scammers, a person with a fully fleshed out LinkedIn profile, complete with employment history, is willing to be publicly associated with this type of fraudulent enterprise.

This time round we can see that the scammers aren’t specific to one software provider, but are offering to “clone” Pragmatic Play, PG Soft, Playson, CQ9, Booongo, Habanero and JiLi games.

At this juncture we should stress that to our knowledge no individual software provider is any more subject to being faked than any other. The names on this list are a little surprising only in that there are some smaller providers here, where ordinarily fakers tend to target the high profile games that large volumes of players actively look for.

Alongside the CEO’s LinkedIn profile, there was a full LinkedIn company page and a link to the distributor’s website:

Looking at the website, we gain more information about the services that this group provide:

i) They are actively advertising that their service is for the black market:

ii) This group aren’t just providing a suite of fake games, they’re offering to rip-off games on demand, from any software provider and are doing so at a cost point that will ensure proliferation of these games:

iii) This group appears to have employees in Serbia but are claiming to operator out of Singapore:

And a previous team member’s LinkedIn result in Google (profile has been deleted on LinkedIn) again showing a location of Singapore:

We can also see from a quick WhoIs Check on the website that this domain only came online earlier this year:

On the website we found the following contact information in the footer:

While the Skype and Telegram addresses didn’t turn up anything useful this time round the email address was far more interesting.

A Google search for this email address turned up only 3 results. Two pages on the website itself, but a third result was a pdf CV document hosted on a CV site, FlowCV.me. This document, alongside including the same email address, provided a full name, address (again, indicating that Singapore is a relevant location), phone number and a link to a LinkedIn profile (this has been deleted):

It also included a link to a profile page on FlowCV with a photo:

As can be seen above, the profile/CV describes the individual as a software developer purporting to have significant experience.

A Google search for the name in these profiles turns up some further results:

- An Instagram account that we can confirm belongs to the same person as it hosts the same picture as the profile above:

- A Twitter account that we can confirm belongs to the same person as it host the same pictures (lots) as the Instagram account):

- A Contra account (freelancing website), offering programming services, that we can confirm is owned by the same person due to a profile picture that matches the profile pic on both the Instagram and Twitter accounts and that links to the same Flow CV profile:

Fake game distributors are clearly taking a more aggressive approach to marketing. Far from covertly and privately reaching out to gambling operators to monetize their shoddy wears, they are now coming out into the open, building social media profiles and websites.

This new approach certainly offers greater financial rewards, but it is replete with additional risks. Data leak, as can be seen in these cases, is an ever present risk when you step out from behind the curtain. Seemingly insignificant pieces of data can cascade, allowing interested parties to find out far more about who is running these operations than was ever intended.

While we’ve redacted much of the information in this article to prevent unscrupulous operators who would be interested in deploying these types of fraudulent games from using this article as an advertisement to locate these providers, we offered to provided unredacted evidence to all of the legitimate software providers named in this article, to assist them in taking action to shut down these groups stealing their intellectual property and cheating players.

Sadly, only a couple of these providers responded to our offer and neither would agree to offer any comment for this article. We’re disappointed to receive such a lukewarm reception to our efforts, but maintain an open door policy to these groups if they change their mind in future.

We also reached out to N1 Interactive, who were the intended recipient of the emails in Case 1. Their response was as follows:

Fake games have been haunting the catalogues of the worst operators in the sector for several years now. That in itself is nothing new. But the political schism that is occurring between East and the West right now is clearly creating an opening that facilitates and incubates this black market trade. Distributors of these rip-off machines are clearly feeling confident that they cannot be reached by anybody with the authority to sanction them for their actions, so much so that they feel that they can now openly promote what they are doing. That’s bad news for players and software providers alike, as it’s likely to result in wider distribution of these fakes.

The unfortunate truth is that it is very challenging for players to protect themselves against fake games. As discussed at the start of this article, the reality is that it’s practically impossible for players to draw valid conclusions about the fairness of a game based on their own play. The high variance of the games makes it unfeasible to produce a large enough data set to establish whether a game is preforming at the advertised settings.

Without being able to tell based on the game play, the only option for players is to stick to playing with reputable operators. How do you know which gambling operators are reputable? Look in the footer of their website. A gambling operator that holds any credible license will have license information and a license seal that it will link to a license verification page:

Gambling operators pay large amounts of money to obtain the various licenses. Being caught offering fake, unlicensed versions of games would be a significant infraction that could potentially result in their license being revoked. It’s highly unlikely that you’ll find fake versions of games being offered at any gambling operator that holds a strong license.

If the site you’re looking at doesn’t have license information, a license seal or that seal does not link to a license verification page on the regulator’s website don’t play with that gambling operator.

Sadly, there have been instances of fake license verification pages being set-up by gambling operators falsely claiming to hold a license with various Curacao Master License holders. This was facilitated by the Master License holders offering minimum publicly available information on their websites, allowing thin copies to be set-up on near match urls. Fortunately these organisations are being decommissions in the coming months (between August 2024 and January 2025) and the Curacao system will move under the control of the centralised Curacao Gaming Control Board, who appear to be taking a more robust approach.

Finally, we would strongly advise players to show a far higher level of caution around any gambling operator that allows you to use crypto currencies. Whilst crypto currencies are constantly changing and evolving, the stark truth is that the anonymous nature of these funding sources makes them a huge challenge to any licensed regulator. If a gambling operator is accepting crypto payments, it will be very challenging for them to obtain a credible license, and the chances of you encountering fake games is far higher.

The million dollar question, and one that some huge game providers have been seeking an answer to for years!

The truth is that massive resources have been invested by the major gaming developers to stop their games being hijacked in this manner, but given the jurisdictions that these groups operate out of, the political barriers to enforcing any consequences on the perpetrators are significant.

Any successful strategy is going to necessitate an open and cooperative relationship between stakeholders in the sector. This means software providers, regulators, operators and affiliates working in unison affect change.

One strategy that software developers could potentially take to mitigate the risks presented by fake games would be to mirror regulators and provide verification seals within their games.

This would not be without challenges, the verification pages would have to be unique to each gambling operator otherwise the fake game developers would simply start building in the right link. And as software providers often don’t know the specific operators that are using their games, due to the resellers that act as a middleman between the software provider and the operator, there is a knowledge gap that would need to be addressed before this could be viably deployed. However, if verification seals were actioned it would be a substantial step forwards in terms of protecting players and building consumer trust in the fairness of the games they are playing.

* Please note that throughout this article we have intentionally redacted or adjusted any information that would allow for the identification of offending parties. Whilst we would like to out these people/organisations for facilitating the wholesale defrauding of players, their brazen actions make clear that attention of this nature is exactly what they are looking for. As such we’ve redacted to prevent this article from channeling new clients to them.