Can you guess today's word?
The Rogue Sites — Playing YOU for a Mug
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Someone cloned us last year. Copied the lot — our name, our look, right down to the wording then slapped it all on a dodgy casino advertising site.
They started with us, and they're still at it, going after any bingo brand you trust. These quick checks will keep you from getting taken for a mug.
Let me tell you what happened, because it shows how good these scammers have got.
A site turned up looking exactly like Glitzy Bingo. Same design. Same logos. Same friendly little write-ups — all our copyright content, lifted wholesale. If you'd found it through Google, you'd have had no reason to think twice. Except it wasn't us.
It was a clone — a fake dressed up as the real thing — and each button on it sent you somewhere else entirely. An online casino with no UK licence. That's what's known as black market: illegal to play on in this country. No rules keeping you safe, no protection for your money, and no way of getting a penny back once it's gone.
“An online casino with no UK licence. That's what's known as black market”
That's what people mean by a clone site. Someone copies a business you trust, borrows its good name, and uses it to reel you in. Then they send you off somewhere they shouldn't.
And the way they did it was clever. Annoyingly clever.
They'd bought up old .co.uk web addresses that used to belong to real British outfits — schools, churches, tea rooms, builders, the whole village noticeboard. Google already trusted those addresses, because they'd been around for years and behaved themselves. So when a scammer builds a fake site on one, it climbs the search results looking far more respectable than it has any right to.
Then there's the other trick, aimed at the big bingo names themselves — your Meccas, your Foxy Bingos.
These dodgy Del Boys register web addresses that look almost like the real thing. A letter changed here. A word swapped there. A hyphen sneaked in where it shouldn't be. Not quite the genuine article. More of a Rooney than a Rodney, if you follow me.
Sorry — big Only Fools fan here. But that's the size of it. The same knock-off game Del Boy ran down the market, only now it's online, sharper, and a lot more dangerous than a dodgy identity bracelet. A site that looks legitimate, ranks like it's legitimate, and is anything but.
