Gaming supplier Pragmatic Play left the US sweepstakes market last year, but its popular slots still remain where operators are willing to break the rules.
SweepsKings has found more than one instance of a US-facing sweepstakes casino serving Pragmatic Play titles like The Dog House, Big Bass Splash, and Gates of Olympus through – what appears to be – custom infrastructure mirroring the games.
These casinos use genuine Pragmatic Play game codes and assets, but deliver them through infrastructure that doesn’t appear to belong to the developer or an affiliated distributor.
This is all despite the studio officially withdrawing from sweepstakes casinos. This time last year, a spokesperson told NEXT.io:
“Pragmatic Play has chosen to discontinue licensing its games to sweepstake operators in US States where restrictions were not already in place, in light of regulatory developments and evolving legislation.”
It was seen as a response to a civil enforcement action filed by the Los Angeles City Attorney against Stake.us and several of its suppliers, including Pragmatic Play.
However, it’s not only Pragmatic Play games that are being offered in this way. Below we’ll detail our findings on dubious systems that involve multiple sweepstakes casinos and multiple suppliers’ games being cloned.
5 Sweepstakes Casinos Using the Same Dubious Infrastructure
Our investigation began with SpinBison and Jackpot Mesa – two sweepstakes casinos we reviewed recently and swiftly placed on our blacklist.
By delving further into publicly available configuration files, we found connections to LVT Casino, Very777, and LetsGo777 too, suggesting a total of five casinos that are part of this wider network.
The sites share configuration, code, and other infrastructure, while their Pragmatic Play games connect to the same external services.
Big Bass Splash, for example, uses Pragmatic’s genuine vs10txbigbass game code. But instead of loading from an official production host, the game client comes from pp.pragmaticsplay-ct.top. The domain is a near-copy of Pragmatic Play’s name, with an extra “s” and an unusual .top extension. Gameplay requests are then sent to a domain called api.omgapiva.com.
We found the same setup when testing the games on more than one casino in the network.
And while we can’t prove from the domains alone that they’re not authorized Pragmatic Play infrastructure (Pragmatic does use obscure domains for some legitimate deployments), it seems unlikely.
Another concerning point is that, while the casinos in this group provide these seemingly cloned games, they don’t always list them under the usual supplier name in the frontend UI. For example, instead of ‘Pragmatic Play’ it says ‘PP’, and instead of ‘PG Soft’ it says ‘PG’ in the lobby. This could be an attempt to muddy the waters further.
On top of this, this group lists Truessence Inc. as its operator in T&Cs. That name is also used by the legitimate Poly Casino, creating another layer of confusion over who actually operates these sites.
The Supplier Behind EpicSweep
Then we found a separate and even more conclusive example of shady behavior at EpicSweep after a thread on our own SweepsKings forum. Incidentally, we recently added EpicSweep to our blacklist after problems with payments to affiliate partners and players began to emerge.
It’s also a red flag that the casino’s catalog now contains 980 games, 641 of which are labeled Pragmatic Play. Again, these titles use genuine game codes and assets, but this time they’re served through infrastructure associated with something called Scorpio Play, which has its own marketing website.
RTP Configuration Per Player
On that site, Scorpio Play describes itself as a B2B game API provider that brings together various – unrelated – suppliers, with the option to configure return to player (RTP) values “per player”. In fact, documentation explicitly gives operators the ability to configure RTP at an individual-player level, while its API requires an RTP value when launching a game.
That gives operators a shady tool for influencing player behavior. A casino could, for example, give a new player a higher RTP so they win more frequently, making the site appear unusually generous at the start, before assigning them a lower RTP later on.
This is completely wrong, as the whole idea behind a slot is that its RTP and chance of win stays consistent on every spin, and for every player.
We have no evidence that EpicSweep is using this capability to manipulate individual players, but it’s a remarkable feature for a game supplier to offer – and on unlicensed games, no less.
‘Bonus Call’
Scorpio Play even advertises a ‘Bonus Call’ feature that can trigger a sequence of spins until a predefined winning amount is reached, while older versions of its website reveal even more.
Scorpio Play originally advertised casino ‘clone scripts’, including products based on famous casino platforms, and promoted the ability to sell “the same quality of original slots” without the usual setup costs. This wording seems to imply that its versions are not the originals.
All things considered, it seems beyond doubt that this operation is stealing Pragmatic Play and other providers’ games and offering them in a shady way to profit.
What This Means for Players
The value of all this goes beyond simply pointing out sweepstakes casinos that players should avoid – it shows how a game can look like a genuine Pragmatic Play title on the surface while being supplied by a completely different, unlicensed third party. And, in the case of Scorpio Play, it shows how shady casinos can give themselves the option to configure a game’s RTP for individual players.
It’s worth remembering, this is not exclusive to Pragmatic Play. In fact, products like Scorpio Play sell themselves on being able to bring all these games from different studios together in one convenient package.
Players therefore cannot necessarily assume that seeing a familiar game name or logo means they are getting the same game under the same conditions as they would from an authorized integration.
This is why it’s vitally important to only play at sweeps casinos you can trust – ones that are transparent about who operates the site and where the games come from.
To get our expert take on whether a sweeps casino is legitimate, you can read our honest reviews and check our blacklist too. We investigate how these sites actually operate in detail so that our readers can make an informed decision about where to play.
Author: Jon Ridehalgh
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