Gambling And Mobile Phones - Who Is Responsible?
I might be getting a rough idea of what it can be like being an investigative journalist and maybe wishing I had pursued a career like this at an early age. I certainly won’t be doing it at 63 years old, that’s for sure, but what have I been investigating, you may ask? Well, it’s nothing very exciting, but it is something I wanted to highlight to people, just so they know before they get drawn into something like the situation I am going to show you.
It’s about games and gambling on mobile phones and how they can draw you in and keep you there. Now I would like you to look at this photo, and I am NOT going to get £4,000. I know that, and I learned very fortunately the easy way, but others may not.
No way, folks, even if I am being told I will, it is a continuous theme!
The mobile game Flower Fever Pop was developed by the mobile gaming studio MadOverGames; their own website states, ‘We build games people keep playing.’
I am going to show you how I WON’T win the £4,000 and how all these games are the same. But I am starting at the £4,000 mark when I should really go to the £2,069 & 29p mark. I was told I could withdraw this amount, as you will see others have ‘supposedly’ done, if you read on, but when I tried to withdraw that amount I got this message, and so I decided to soldier on to the £4k mark, knowing it wouldn’t be won!
So, you know, I like a gamble. I am fortunate, and I am a low-spending gambler, usually £5-10 per weekend, quite often just the £5. I used to spend more, not a lot more, but I was earning more, and that was my choice. My wife would spend her money in Next or M&S; I would spend mine in the local bookies. Like most gamblers, I had good and bad days, but more often they were bad days.
My favourite horse bet is a 10p each-way patent, costing £1.40, which is how big a gambler I was and am! It means picking 3 horses, and the bet itself consists of 3 single bets, one for each selection; 3 double bets, which combine pairs of selections; and 1 treble bet, combining all three selections, and they accumulate to give bigger winnings than otjer bets!.
My best ever return was using tipping site selections, and my £1.40 bet returned about £135. Now that means all three horses have to win, so you are getting the win and the each-way bet, and the odds for each horse have to be over 9/1, so the chances of that happening are pretty rare, even though some will have won more.
I have been in bookies where people have rushed to the counter just as a race is about to go off and stuck £50 or more on a horse to win that has come nowhere. I have myself stuck 5/6 teams on an accumulator football bet, which has included a team like, say, Man City to beat Burnley at home, just to bump the odds up, as in football terms, or betting terms, it is a ‘dead cert’, and Burnley have held out for a draw, and so ruining the bet – and that is betting. Just when you think you’re onto a winner, your betting world just crashes down around you! Now admittedly, the well-known betting sites can’t be accessed by anyone, but others probably can!
So back to these games on mobile phones, which I can imagine can be accessed by anyone with a phone. According to my research, and courtesy of Google, I found this:
1. Gatekeeping: Companies like Apple (via the App Store) and Google (via the Google Play Store) control which games are allowed onto their platforms based on their own safety, content, and developer policies.
2. Distribution: They provide the infrastructure, payment systems, and management tools, and they have the power to remove apps that break their rules.
3. Pre-installed apps: In rare cases, your mobile network carrier may pre-install apps or games onto a locked phone as part of your service agreement.
So to me the responsibility seems to be shared, and there are guidelines, but it is more about adult content, violence, hate speech, or copyright violations, rather than hooking you in to try to win money that you will never win. If you don’t believe me, just ask your search engine or ChatGPT which games on phones reliably pay out winnings, and you will see your answer – basically none.
So, back to games on mobiles. I started playing games to keep my mind alert, and one of my favourites was and still is solitaire, and of course you can play for money. You can play by paying as little as £1 entry per game, with a prize pool of about £9/10. Split between the winners and some for the game. And I would win a little bit here and a little bit there, and the pot would grow, then reduce, then grow and so on and so on. I did manage to withdraw some winnings, but then what was left in my pot would be lost, and so I would deposit another £5 and win some and lose some and withdraw a little bit, and that was the circle that was my solitaire. If, like the promises, people earn the large sums of money that the adverts boast you can. I would love to hear from them. It must be great sitting at home playing games instead of working for a living – you see ads like this (not necessarily for solitaire but for other games too.)
It’s only £37.92 for a week's gaming, and I’m not saying it didn’t happen, but I am saying it’s unlikely, and of course, did it cost anything to play?
How about this one? Are they insinuating that she made $22,863.36 in a week? Because it looks like they are? Pro rata that is nearly £1.2m per year – really. If one person could do this, so could everyone and no one would work for a living
I once had a really good amount in my solitaire account. I paid £79 to enter a game and lost it all, and let me tell you how it works.
When you play with your money, what you win you keep, but it is rare, but these games entice you in by letting you get ‘bonus money.’ Starting with as little as 10p per day when you visit the site, every 24 hours you get a little more, sometimes the same, then 30p, then £1, and of course it adds up until you can enter a game. But if you win using bonus money, you can’t withdraw it as cash into your account; there is a calculation involved where the site keeps most of it, and if you withdraw your smaller amount in real cash, you then lose your bonus money, but hang on, it gets sneakier.
Various solitaire sites that I went on were very generous and gave me an £8 welcome, or welcome back bonus, all different sites, all £8 (I am using £’s though some were in $’s.) But here is the thing: on all of these sites, and I would say maybe 4 or 5, I would win quite easily to start with, but on ALL the sites, once my little pot got up to the £30/35 mark, for some strange reason, I would start losing. The reason was the level you had to achieve before withdrawing anything was £40, but I was playing the same levels that got me into the £30 area, and playing the same way, but I would lose the money, and I would lose it all. Remember, I couldn’t cash any of it into my bank, as I had won it using bonus money.
This is done simply to lure you in to thinking you got up to £30 using their money; you can do it using yours, and so you deposit yours, which you will invariably lose. Hopefully you can see where I am coming from. This became apparent to me very quickly and without spending much money at all, and once I had got to the £30ish mark using one site's £8 bonus money, I deliberately went to others to get theirs specifically to see if the same thing was going to happen, which I pretty much knew would happen, and of course it did.
My latest game is ‘Vita Mahjong,’ with no financial involvement, just for fun and again to keep the mind occupied; however, the downside is the annoying ads, and this is when I decided to investigate a bit deeper, when a game called ‘Flower Fever Pop' kept appearing, telling me it would give me money right, left and centre, and I could win loads, even pennies for starting to play, transferred into my PayPal account, which, by the way, I have never received, but there is more, and I will explain in photos, here goes:
Flower Fever Pop is a good little game to keep you amused, and I can see why they say they make games people keep playing. Flowers are split into vases, and you have to move the flowers about to get three of the same flower into one vase, then off they pop, never to be seen again. You can only move the highlighted flowers; once they have left a vase, the dimmed flowers light up, meaning you can then move them. You keep doing this until all the flowers have gone. You earn money when three flowers disappear, when you achieve higher levels and so on, and the pot just keeps growing, as you can see from photographs – but it’s not that simple.
To move flowers to get them to disappear, you play for about 10/15 seconds. Then you get a choice to either watch a video to earn more money or earn a much smaller amount to skip the video. To get your pot level higher, you tend to select the video to watch; after all, you want to get to a level quicker so you can withdraw it, but as my little exercise has proved, you can’t.
The more frustrating aspect was that even when I chose the lower amount, I didn’t want to waste time with videos; every second time I did this, a video was shown anyway. So you might as well work it out so that you choose the higher amount every second option and then choose the lower amount every other time. It will speed things up, but videos will still be there to be seen. But you collect less money that you will never withdraw anyway!
Now don’t get me wrong, I am not sitting there watching videos every minute of the day; I do it whilst I am watching a programme whereby I can do my 15 seconds of flower matching, then watch the TV whilst the videos play. But the videos are there to try to entice you into downloading more games and maybe spending more money
So you can see from the photos I kept playing with my pot getting bigger and bigger, and I wasn’t giving in until I reached that figure of £4,000, after the first refusal. It has taken hours, but I had to do it. Remember not to win the £4,000, but to find out why I WOULDN’T win it!
The Super rewards started up at £20 odd and more, but look at the photo above; as my pot got bigger, the rewards got smaller, and less than the £2.30 you can see. They must have been worried about getting my pot to the £4k mark and having to pay me out, which of course they didn’t! But why only me? It is unfair; is it discrimination? Well, it can’t be, as they don’t know who I am, but take a look at these photos.
All the time I was playing, I kept getting told about the withdrawals that other unknown players were making, and they were all under that £4,000 that I was told I had to reach (go back to my first photo, and I couldn’t withdraw my balance of £2,069 – why not if others could!) Well, let’s ask ourselves – are they real players? All your research and all the reality is they are not, and of course they are not. Whoever is responsible for this game could not possibly afford to pay these amounts out on a regular basis without taking any money to play the game.
But that’s what happens, and you will maybe think I am mad, but when I tried to withdraw at the magical £4k mark, I was told I had to get to £8,000, so I did it. I got there after quite a few wasted hours, and would you believe the next barrier then hit me? Well, I knew it was coming, but I had to find out why.
I have done everything asked of me; I have got to the £4k & £8k levels asked of me, and I am being told I must now achieve higher levels. I passed 2 more levels but couldn’t withdraw anything, and I came back the next day, and still I couldn’t withdraw a penny, and now because I am able to show the world what all this is about, I have deleted the app and will be contacting the game makers to see if they have a comment, but why did I have to get to £8k and more and not get a penny, and yet all these other players were ‘supposedly’ withdrawing between £2k & £3k
To end with, I wanted to show how these sites (not necessarily Flower Fever Pot) they will show you images of people giving away £1,000 to complete strangers because they have so much and a theme within the adverts. Winning hundreds of £’s or $’s. Having a purse full of money and getting well-known celebrities or look-alikes to promote the games. Personally with this one I believe it to be the real thing, but does he know!
Either way, folks, that is how it all works. You won’t win anything; if you pay, it is unlikely you will win; if you don’t pay, you definitely won’t win, but for those of you who don’t know, that is how it works.
Unfortunately MadOverGames didn’t reply, so I thought I would post this for people to better understand gaming and gambling on mobile phones.
Thanks for reading.
DJ
