The casino industry is one that aggressively markets to players and potential players. Many of us see ads all the time offering a sign-up bonus, an incentive to return, highlights of upcoming entertainment acts and so on.
In markets where online casinos exist, the ads extend into offering players incentives to play on various online casinos.
However, social media always requires a bit of verification. Take this message we got from a player recently:
There were two posts on Facebook to download the new Tulalip Casino online slot play app (tribal casino north of Seattle) and they want you to pay to play and in Washington state that is illegal. It’s the same thing for the Muckleshoot Casino. You look at the picture of the slot ticket and it says Tulalip Casino Las Vegas Nevada on it. I even called the Muckleshoot Casino; they knew nothing about it.
Fred D.
What you have here are examples of fake ads set up by scammers to attempt to take money from players who see familiar names and lure them in to get money. This isn’t limited to Washington; a similar scenario was recently reported being spotted in Kansas. A casino in California also recently shared a warning. And the Washington state casinos you mentioned are also working to resolve it.
Unfortunately this isn’t anything new on social media; there’s profiles set up constantly pretending to be other brands too, such as popular clothing brands. The ads can look just like the ones the actual brand runs, making it harder to know you’re looking at the right one.
There are ways to protect yourself, however. For instance, the genuine article tends to have a blue checkbox that the fake one does not. Other times ads are run on profiles with generic names; the Kansas example above showed the ads running on profiles with generic names like “Online slots” and “Online games” as opposed to the name of the casino, although they could certainly set up profiles with that name as well. But those profiles wouldn’t have the blue verified checkmark like the actual casinos would.
If you want to make sure a particular ad is genuine, you can look into the ad transparency settings on platforms like Facebook, where you can see who owns the page, what ads they’re running, and so on. Many times these can offer further clues as to whether this is an actual casino ad or not.
If you want to verify if the casino itself has an online option, you can go to the specific casino’s website and see if they’re promoting an app – the ones that have them tend to have a prominent reference to it in their navigation or their homepage (and oftentimes both).
There are also third party websites like Flip The Switch that link to reputable options, which you can use if you want to be sure you’re going to the real deal.
But ultimately, if online gaming is not yet available in your state, ads claiming that it is are most likely fake and attempting to scam unsuspecting victims, so be careful. If it seems too good to be true, it probably is.
The same thing is happening to Winstar. It doesn’t have a slots app to play games so the ad running on fb reels is a fake. Winstar is trying to get it taken down. The app Winstar has is for booking rooms seeing your freeplay and adding money to players card from your debit or credit card as a wallet. To hold money you played in a machine when u cash out. But it is Not an Online Casino to play slots. Also a few players I know found out that when u do hit the link it uses different countries and names to charge u money to “play” like dubi or denali etc. Then they have your card number and can scam money from your account and wipe u out
Thanks for sharing this additional example Rachel – always smart to be careful! Back in 2023 Winstar announced an app that allowed playing on a phone while on their property, but I see a comment from last month on a news article about that topic asking if it’s legit – we can’t find reference to it on their website so perhaps someone’s trying to take advantage of that confusion.