Casino News: Report of eCOGRA player dispute figures, 2006

E Commerce and Online Gaming Regulation and Assurance (eCOGRA), the autonomous body in online gambling & player protection has published the report of 2006 stating the figures for player disputes. Gaming Advocate Tex Rees handled these disputes.

Advocate for fir gaming Rees has worked as a representative of players having valid complaints against any online casino or poker room carrying the "Play It Safe" kitemark. In present online gambling, 92 online casinos and 23 poker rooms bear the eCOGRA seal of "Play It Safe".

According to the report of Rees, 599 complaints were received so far; he has accepted 360 amongst them. 142 refused requests were associated with the online gambling websites not fall under the eCOGRA. Those websites still have not submitted to the inspection, monitoring and dispute resolution regime of eCOGRA. So those websites are beyond the responsibility of fair gaming Advocate. Apart from the, 97 more requests were considered to be invalid.

Players' have got favor in 45% of the total accepted complaints handled by FGA. There were some complaints, which were not subject specific & no step was taken. FGA has taken around 3 days time period to resolve the disputes.

Major complained areas were:

* 50%Cash-ins (Up from 38 percent in 2005)

* 26%Bonus (Down from 32 percent in 2005)

*19% Locked Accounts (Up from 16 percent in 2005)

The average number of weekly-received disputes were11.5, which was 9.5 in 2005.

Advocate Rees commented on the statistics that the average number of received disputes per month was slightly down at 0.4 comparing to that of 2005, which was 0.7. He also shown evidences to prove that the "Play It Safe" sealed operations by eCOGRA applied accurately to the online gambling website s standards and player sensitivity measures.

Advocate Rees added,” Considering the very high volumes of business transactions which these venues process every day, the dispute rate is still remarkably low".