Write to us

1

The route, and why it is not typed here

Wherever this site publishes its correspondence route, that is where the route lives. It is not typed into this paragraph, and it can be had on request. An address sitting inside prose is the first detail to rot when anything changes, and copying a rotten one means the message reached no one.

What can be pinned down here is the other half of the business: what a message should hold, what it can achieve, and the longer list of things it cannot. Publishing that second list is more use to a reader than any promise to look into anything.

2

What makes a message usable

Three things, and a fourth that speeds everything up.

• The page. Every sheet carries a ruled line above its heading giving the sheet’s name or number, its revision and the date the figures were last counted. Quoting that line puts a correction on the right page immediately.
• The figure as printed. Copy it exactly, including the pence, because a sheet can carry a dozen totals and only one of them is the one in question.
• The figure you believe is right, and why.
• The primary source behind it. Attach a statute, a regulator’s own page, an official register or a scheme’s published terms and the correction can be acted on at once.

Sources are read strictly here, and saying so in advance is only fair. An industry blog will not settle a point, nor will trade press, a solicitor’s briefing or a competing affiliate page, however confidently any of them states one. A figure with no primary source behind it is a figure this site will not print. That rule is spelled out at who counts this, and it applies to incoming post as much as to anything written here.

Useful messages come in three kinds, all of them about numbers. A figure printed wrongly. A figure that has moved since it was printed. A figure absent where the arithmetic clearly wanted one. Everything else gets read, and most of it will not change a page.

3

What happens when a correction lands

One undertaking, and it is the only one worth giving: a figure shown to be wrong is put right, and the change is stated rather than quietly swapped in.

In practice the revision number above the heading goes up by one, the counted date moves, and the corrected figure replaces the old one. Where that figure fed a calculation, each total standing under it is recomputed and reset, and the recomputation is where the days go. A count feeds a face value, the face value feeds the credit, the credit feeds the remainder, so one wrong penny at the top can move four figures underneath it.

No turnaround time is promised on this page, because a promise about speed is the easiest thing to publish and the hardest to keep. What is promised is the shape of the answer: what changed, on which sheet, and what it was changed to.

4

What will not be done, and who does it

This site will not approach an operator on a reader’s behalf, and it will not advise on an individual dispute. It cannot chase a withheld withdrawal, cannot ask for an account to be reopened, cannot get anybody’s money back and has no sight of anybody’s account. It is a publisher of arithmetic with no standing in a cashier’s decision.

Saying so is not a brush-off, because there is a route that does have standing, and it is written down with its clocks. A complaint goes to the operator first. An acknowledgement is owed quickly, in working days rather than weeks. The whole process may not exceed eight weeks, and a licensee cannot refuse to hear a complaint made inside six months of the incident. The closing letter then has to explain the way through to an adjudicator, approved as such by the regulator. Those stages, and what the regulator will not do, are timed out at staying in control.

One caution belongs with that. Offers listed on these sheets are licensed outside Great Britain, so that timetable is not owed by the cashier at the far end of a commercial link. A complaints route exists under some offshore rulebooks, with comparable clocks, but the approval of the adjudicator is the part that goes missing. Which is the strongest reason on this site to price a count before opening anything.

5

Questions with no answer here

A few come in often enough to answer in advance.

Whether a particular operator is running a particular offer this week is not something this site will confirm. Conditions move weekly, nothing here was read off a live cashier today, and a kind of condition is what gets priced. No bonus code is printed as current either.

Nor will anything be supplied about reaching a site somebody has shut themselves out of, or about getting round blocking software or a bank’s gambling block. That holds however the question is phrased, and it is the one subject on which a message gets no answer at all beyond the helpline number closing this sheet.

Help that is free and confidential sits behind one number, 0808 8020 133, which is the National Gambling Helpline and is answered at any hour of any day. A reader who needs that rather than a corrected figure should ring it instead of writing here, and nothing is lost by doing so.