Write to us, and read first what an inbox can settle

01

One address, and what is worth sending to it

Messages reach this publication at post@bingonodepositbonus.uk. There is no form, no telephone line and no live chat, and nothing is collected at this address beyond what a sender chooses to type into a message.

Four kinds of message are genuinely useful here, and each one has the same shape: a page, a sentence, and what is wrong with it.

• A figure that does not add up. Name the page and the number. Arithmetic is printed in full on these pages precisely so that it can be checked by somebody else.
• A rule that has moved. Regulation changes on dates, and a page written before a date is wrong after it. A link to the source carries more weight than a description of it.
• A page that reads like a sales sheet. That is a fault in the writing, and it is corrected rather than defended.
• A link that goes nowhere, or an entry in the ranking whose terms no longer match what the operator publishes.

A message naming the page and quoting the line gets dealt with faster than one that does not. Nothing else about the sender is needed, and nothing else is asked for.

02

Four things this address has no power to do

This publication is not an operator, not a regulator and not an adjudicator, so four common requests cannot be met from here however reasonable they are.

• Money cannot be recovered. No balance is held here and no payment can be released, reversed or chased.
• An account cannot be opened, altered or shut. Account records belong to the operator and are reachable only through the operator.
• A withdrawal cannot be hurried. Nobody here has standing with any cashier.
• An exclusion cannot be touched. Not shortened, not paused, not worked around. That is the scheme’s business and the scheme’s rules apply.

Each of those has a proper route, and the proper route is faster than the wrong one. The next two parts set them out.

03

The operator’s own process runs to published deadlines

A complaint starts with the licensee, and the timetable is not left to the licensee’s discretion. Six months is the minimum window: a customer has to be able to complain for at least that long from the date of the incident, so a delay of weeks costs nothing.

Acknowledgement is owed within three working days, and within 24 hours where the operator offers gambling around the clock, which online firms generally do. Everything after that has to be done within eight weeks of the complaint first arriving, and an escalation inside the firm counts against that same period rather than extending it.

One pause is allowed in that eight weeks, and it is worth understanding. Where the operator makes a reasonable request for information and the customer does not answer within seven days, the clock may be stopped. It restarts from the same point once the customer replies, so an unanswered request does not reset anything, but it does hold everything up.

The letter that ends the process has three jobs. It has to explain the decision. It has to state that the operator’s own procedure has now finished. And it has to set out how the complaint can be taken to an independent alternative dispute resolution body. A final letter missing the third of those has not done its work.

04

The regulator takes the report and not the case

The Gambling Commission’s own answer to consumers who want a dispute resolved is that resolving disputes is not what it does. It licenses, it sets conditions, it inspects and it publishes enforcement, and it acts against a licensee rather than for an individual. A report sent to it still matters, because enforcement is built out of reports, but it will not return a balance.

What the Commission does hold is the public record, and the record is open to anybody. Registers of licence holders, of the people holding personal licences and of the actions taken against both can be searched and downloaded without asking. The checks worth running before a dispute ever starts are listed on how we are paid, and they take a couple of minutes.

Outside the British licence none of this exists. No complaints timetable binds the operator, no adjudicator will take the file, and the Commission has no authority over a business it has not licensed. The pages in outside the licence price that absence rather than describing it.

05

What happens to a correction once it lands

Any sentence whose source cannot be produced comes off the page. It is not softened, not hedged and not left standing behind a qualifier. Where a figure was right and has since moved, the figure is replaced and the date at the head of the page changes with it, so a reader can see which version they are looking at.

Where a correction cannot be made because the underlying fact is not published anywhere citable, the page says so in those words. An unknown printed as an unknown is worth more than an estimate dressed as a measurement. The sourcing rules behind all of this are on who prints this, and the commercial arrangement that sits beside them is on how we are paid.

06

When the gambling is the problem rather than the page

An inbox is the wrong tool for that and a slow one. Ringing 0808 8020 133 costs nothing, and the helpline on the other end of it is open at every hour. Registration with Gamstop Online shuts every gambling site holding a British licence, at no cost and in one go. Both routes, together with the limits an operator has to offer and the periods an exclusion can run for, are set out on staying in control.