Casinos close. We know this better than most, having gone through our own archive and found that 48 of the 74 casinos we have reviewed can no longer legally take a deposit from a player in Britain.
So here is the question nobody asks until it is too late. If the site you play at shuts down tomorrow, what happens to the balance sitting in your account?
The honest answer is that it depends entirely on how it shuts down, and the three ways it can happen are not remotely equivalent.
When it goes to plan
Start with the mildest case, because it happens more often than closure. A licence can be suspended while the Commission investigates, and a suspended operator is not a dead one.
On 28 August the Commission suspended the operating licences of BresBet Ltd and Bet St George Ltd pending reviews into suspected social responsibility and anti-money laundering failings. Both were still required to let customers reach their accounts and withdraw. Suspension stops new business, not your money.
An orderly closure is nearly as manageable. The Commission expects an online operator that is winding down to give customers at least two weeks’ notice, and says four is better.
It expects every attempt to be made to return customer funds, including to people who have not logged in for years. It expects a web page where you can claim your balance, open for at least four weeks after the site itself goes.
And it expects the operator to decide in advance what happens to money nobody claims, and to tell you that before the shutters come down rather than after.
When it doesn’t
Insolvency is a different animal. A business that cannot pay its debts as they fall due, and a withdrawal request is a debt, has to stop trading and take advice from an insolvency practitioner.
Which insolvency route it takes matters to you. In administration the business can keep operating while somebody tries to rescue it. In liquidation the operating licence lapses, and the thing you had an account with stops existing in any useful sense.
At that point your balance is not your balance. It is a claim, queued behind whatever other claims exist, and the Commission is blunt about how little it can do. Money deposited with a gambling business, it says, is not protected by the Commission or the government the way a personal bank account is.
There is no legal duty on a gambling operator to protect customer funds against insolvency at all. Segregation is required of remote operators, but segregated money can still form part of the assets of a failed business.
If you want the worked example, Football Index is it. BetIndex went into administration in March 2021, and press reports put customer losses above £90 million. The government said plainly that it would not use public money to make anybody whole.
What you can do now
Three things, and none of them take long.
Find out what your casino’s terms say about protection of customer funds. Every operator holding your money has to disclose its rating, in the terms and at the point you first deposit. It is a four-word phrase and it is worth reading.
Then stop treating the account as a wallet. A balance left sitting at an operator is an unsecured loan to a business whose finances you cannot see. Withdraw what you are not using.
That goes double for the account you forgot about. Dormant balances are the ones that get lost, because the closure notice goes to an inbox you no longer read and the claims window shuts four weeks later. We are working through our casino reviews rewriting the closed ones to say what happened and when, because a search result will happily send you to a site that stopped existing two years ago.
And check the licence is real before the money goes in, which our guide to safe casino gambling walks through. An unlicensed site owes you nothing at all, and no amount of insolvency law helps you get it back.
None of this is a reason to panic about the site you play at. It is a reason to keep less money there than you would in a bank, because that is the only part of this you control.
Image: the Rolls Building, London, by Roger Green, CC BY-SA 4.0.
18+. Gambling should be entertainment, not income. Long term the house wins. Free and confidential help is at BeGambleAware.org.
