Online Gambling Sites Reviews – Who can you trust and who should be avoided?

There are thousands of online gambling review sites out there on the internet. Some are run from somebody’s bedroom in their spare time, some are run by multi-billion dollar media companies and some are even run by the online gambling sites themselves. So how can you find out which ones are truly independent and honest and which ones are just there to earn a fast buck off your back? We are not going to review every single one of them but we will mention some of the ones you are most likely to come across.

Honest & independent online gambling reviews sites

Yes No Casino

We have mentioned it before so we are not going to go into too much more detail here, but Yes No Casino is run by two brothers who have been gambling since our teens. We started this website almost as a protest against all the charlatans and media companies out there who are only interested in fleecing their visitors and certainly have absolutely no interest in responsible gambling, helping gambling addicts or in providing honest online casino reviews. From time to time we have friends of ours writing about this, that or the other as well. It all comes from the heart and as we have full time jobs we don’t have time for generic bull so while we may skip over some details from time to time the important information is always there and you know what you are getting. We are super strict with who we recommend as with thousands of online casinos, bookies, bingo sites etc why on earth would we even take a chance on the crappy ones when there are plenty of good ones out there.

10 of our favourite online gambling sites:

Rank
Casino
Bonus
Rating
Visit Casino
1
N1 Casino
2
Slots Million Casino
3
Redbet Casino
4
King Billy Casino
5
iLucki Casino
6
Power Spins Casino
7
Winning Room Casino
8
Slots Magic Casino
9
AHTI Games Casino
10
PlayOJO Casino

Of course Yes No Casino is not the only good gambling review site available to you, here are a few good resources for you to also check out.

Online Casino Reviewer

Dave is one of the good guys of this industry. Sadly the good guys often get knocked down and it is no different for him. OCR is currently in a legal battle with a rogue casino chain based out of Manchester UK and so far thankfully the high court is siding in his favour. You can check out the video blogs following this process on the website. Another incredible incident though is a sign of just how low some rogue casino chains are willing to stoop. Burnbet actually issued him with death threats after exposing their ilegal operations! On the lower end of the scale his website has had numerous negative SEO attacks (actually Yes No Casino has also been on the hard end of these too). Negative SEO attacks are done by rogue gambling sites who do not like negative reviews or they are carried out by dodgy review sites who want to steal positions in google rankings. You can check out this website here: https://www.onlinecasinoreviewer.com/

The POGG

The POGG a.k.a. The Players Online Gambling Guide is another excellent independent reviewer and another that holds integrity high up. Duncan and his team also offer mediation services and has been working together with the UKGC. These guys are a very hard working bunch and it is a shame that the media giants drown out the decent honest reviewers. Visit their website here: https://thepogg.com/

Casinomeister

Casinomeister has been around since the dawn of the internet and is the number one online gambling forum in the world. While the website itself and now the forum have been having rather belated make-overs, you can’t take anything away from the community. The complaints service (PAB) offered by Casinomeister is one of the most well known in the industry and the active forum allows for quick identification of dodgy and rogue online gambling sites. Visit the Casinomeister forum here: https://www.casinomeister.com/forums/

Online gambling review sites owned by media giants

Catena Media

Catena Media are a media giant whose aim is “To become the world’s number one provider of high-value iGaming leads.” no matter what the cost. They own a lot of gambling reviews sites but the most notable of these are “MrBet”, “Sports, Bets & Tips”, “John Slots”, “NetEnt Casino”, “Right Casino” and of course the name everyone knows and hates “Ask Gamblers”.

Catena Media purchased Ask Gamblers a few years ago for €14,000,000 from a smaller company run by an avid non gambler. You can still see the original owners story on their site and I will quote ” I never gambled, I was never, whatsoever, interested in gambling. All that I now know about gambling I have learned from running this business over the years. I never gambled.”

Now Ask Gamblers was occasionally iffy in the past but since the take over by Catena the site (and their other gambling ‘review’ sites) will basically sell their own grandmother for one new customer. Their ethics toward rogue casinos is questionable at times and they promote a lot of very low quality sites. We have seen their pricing list and advertising prices can range from hundreds of dollars per day to tens of thousands per month. This on top of taking a huge percentage of any players losses at the casinos they promote.

We have heard stories of Catena pressuring casinos not to pay out players who won big through them and while the jewel in their crown is their mediation service, this is actually an automated system between player and gambling site and AskGamblers do not even get involved. Add to that their ratings are based on who pays the most, they can make complaints disappear and we have written good quality honest player reviews for their casinos which they have deleted as they did not fit in due to what the casino paid them to be promoted. All in all we can find nothing positive from this company and we advise extreme caution if you ever visit any one of their gambling portals. When there are good honest reviewers out there why would you even take the risk though with review sites that cannot be trusted?

XL Media

XL Media are not in the same ball park as Catena with regards to screwing over their readers, however we still advise caution when dealing with the super rich marketing companies as profits come before player satisfaction. XL Media is an Israeli media giant which owns over 2,000 websites in 18 languages across multiple industries (Gambling, Credit Cards, etc). Some notable properties include “Free bets” and “Online Casinos” but there really are too many to mention as they own over 500 online gambling sites! They even tried to buy our website from us last year.

Online gambling “review” sites owned by casino chains

The GiG Group

The GiG online casino chain actually own a lot of gambling reviews sites. Most recently in April 2017 they spent €5,700,000 on a predominantly German orientated gambling review network. In March 2017 they spent an amazing €11,500,000 on the online casino site “Casino Tops Online”.  You will see from all their supposedly independent reviews sites that they are simply funnelling all their visitors to their own casinos and to their white label partners running on the iGaming Cloud. The best ratings, the most prominent positions on their websites? All their own brands.

There are plenty of other casino chains who own gambling review sites like the Betsson Group, 888 Holdings, etc. We find it completely baffling that none of the regulators or governments do anything about this as a simple “conflict of interests” investigation would legally see action taken.

An online casino advertising their competitors?

Go Win Casino

We have outed our displeasure at the god awful Nektan white label provider many times already, but one of these cheap as chips sites stands out from the rest. The UK gambling site Go Win claims to be an online casino but in fact it is an affiliate portal in disguise. They are using the casino front to boost the search results in Google and Bing but in the background they are more interested in pushing their blog posts where they actually advertise loads of other online casinos. It is certainly a very interesting tactic but one we strongly dissaprove of.

Online gambling sites promoting rogues

Last but not least we come to gambling portals who blatantly promote criminals. Now it would not be fair for us to bad mouth portals who are promoting gambling sites we do not recommend as we have the highest standards we know of. However as a measure of trustworthyness of a portal we can pin point those sites who promote casinos who have been caught using illegal software, caught running fraud and those who have even been closed down with the owners put in jail. We are talking about sites like Grand Parker, Loco Panda, Onbling, Burnbet, Winner Million. There are literally thousands of portals who promote these rogues so we’ll just pick out a few of the higher profile ones: “Bitcoin Sportsbooks”, “The Big Free Chip List”, “Casino Deals”, “Casino Deposit Bonuses”, “Casino Countdown”, “Gaming Zion”, “Online Casino Reports”, “Legal Gambling USA”, “USA Online Casinos org”, “Oline Gambling Bible”, “Bet Amu”, “Roulette Roulette info”, “Best Online Casinos”, “No Deposit Bonus”, “United States of Casinos”, “eCasino USA”, “Casino Bonus 2”, “Free Casino Games”, “Casino Freak”, “All Free Chips”, “NetEnt Casino List”, “New Casinos”, “Online Casino Dollar”, “NetEnt No Deposit”, “Compare Casino Sites”, “Slot Fruit”, “Online Casino Archives”, “New Free Spins No Deposit” and “Play Cash Games”. There are so many more but you get the picture by now.

Anyone promoting criminals cannot be trusted. Stay away and visit a trusted gambling sites review portal instead.

One thing we noticed when digging out these charlatans is the level of effort these sites put into everything they do. Basically no effort at all. All the reviews are generic and obviously written by cheap copy writers with no understanding of the online gambling industry. Most of these online gambling sites have also seemingly just added every casino that they came across. No research, no nothing just throw as many reviews onto the site as possible and sit back. A great deal of the websites haven’t even updated in a long time yet still you come across them on google.