User:Mr.Smith
From Dark Patterns
Online Gambling Site "Jackpot Joy"
At least two of the techniques described in the Navigation List to the left are practised by this outfit.
This concerns the techniques Bait and Switch, and Privacy Zuckering.
My story:
Some months ago an advert that appeared while I was browsing ebay caught my attention. A gambling site, whose ad campaign is fronted by a well known British actress and national treasure. The advert offered a familiar deal for such sites: The customer pays ten pounds into their Jackpot Joy account, and Jackpot Joy adds twice that, £20 to the amount.
Creating the account and paying in money direct from my bank account was very easy, though I would have preferred to use Paypal to pay the money in to protect any details of my account being available to Jackpot Joy. But no such payment method is made available.
I played on the roulette tables for my amusement, simply not expecting to win anything, but succeeded in winning a nominal amount. I decided to call it a day, leaving the amount I had paid in, the amount added on, and the winnings I had made, in the Jackpot Joy account.
Some months later I returned to the site, and decided to play the roulette game again.
This time I managed to take the amount to just over £100, again playing on the roulette game. At this point I decided to withdraw £100 from the Jackpot Joy account back to my bank account. This action was blocked by Jackpot Joy. A previously unannounced, non-transparent at point of creating the account process was then initiated in which Jackpot Joy demanded three items of very personal identification. The kind of identification details that any sane person simply would not send out by any means over the internet, nor by mail.
A series of heated exchanges via email ensued, ending with the stubborn refusal on my part to give the demanded information in full, and a stubborn lack of concern, even mockery on the part of Jackpot Joy to hand out the money.
They claim that this identification requirement is enforced by British Gambling Authorities, but when I researched it further, they are not actually governed by British Gambling Law because their operation is run from Gibraltar, and thus, any legal case mounted against them would have to be carried out through channels in Gibraltar.
Effectively, because I refuse to give them sensitive identification, they have profited from the whole affair. Granted, this is not unlike any gambling operation. That kind of business only sets up so that overall "the house always wins".
But it is not the relative folly of gambling itself that concerns me here, but the lack of transparency of how the site, which is very popular and nationally advertised, and through apparently above board channels (ebay, british commercial television, large ads in the British press, etc.) operates without a policy of fair and decent transparency.
Their policy should be to make it transparent in their adverts and on the pages where a customer creates an account online, that at a point at which the customer will wish to withdraw money, they will have to provide full photographic samples of their birth certificate, driver's license, and a current bill. Thus someone creating an account would be fully aware of what would be asked of them were they to win money and wish to withdraw it.
Jackpot Joy's policy is to obscure that this is what they will do at the account creating stage of the proceedings.
