Safety and the law
How to avoid gambling scams
Most gambling scams are not casinos at all. They are fake apps, tipster subscriptions, and people who contact you after you have already lost money.
The single most useful habit is to never follow a link to an operator. Type the address or install from the store listing you searched for yourself.
The four common shapes
Cloned sites with a near-identical domain, one letter off, harvesting deposits and card details.
Fake apps in third-party stores or APK sites, sometimes carrying a real login screen in front of nothing.
Tipster subscriptions selling a record with the losing bets removed. Always the same tell: no timestamps, no prices, no archive.
Recovery scams, where somebody contacts you claiming they can retrieve money you lost, for a fee. This one targets people who are already in trouble and it is the ugliest of the set.
The two-minute check
Find the licence number in the footer, then look it up on the regulator's own register rather than on the operator's page. If the operator claims an Ontario registration, iGaming Ontario publishes the list.
Check the address bar character by character on a phone, because a small screen truncates domains and that is exactly what the clone is counting on.
Look for payment methods that cannot be reversed. An operator that only accepts gift cards or direct crypto transfers with no card option is telling you something.
If it has already happened
Contact your bank or card issuer first, then the operator's regulator if it claims one. Report it to the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre.
Do not pay anybody who offers to get it back. That is a second scam aimed at the same person, and it works far more often than it should.