Casino Complaints and ADR – Where to Actually Complain

Casino Complaints and ADR: Where to Complain, and What Each Route Can Actually Do

If a casino has your money and will not release it, the working order is: the operator's own complaints process first, then a free Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) provider, then the regulator, and only then your bank. Skipping a rung usually gets your case bounced back down it. The regulator you are counting on – UKGC, MGA, Curaçao, Anjouan – is in most cases not the body that recovers your money. The ADR provider is.

That surprises most players, so here is the honest map of who does what, how long it takes, and what your realistic odds are.

The Escalation Ladder

1. 1Operator internal complaint. Mandatory everywhere. It is a licence condition, and every rung above it will ask whether you completed it.
2. 2ADR provider. Free to you, paid for by the operator. This is the rung that actually reviews the evidence and produces an outcome.
3. 3Regulator. Handles licence breaches and patterns. In Great Britain it will not adjudicate your individual dispute at all. In Malta it will.
4. 4Card chargeback. Card deposits only, tight deadlines, real downside.
5. 5Court or small claims. Realistic against a domestic licensee, largely theoretical against an offshore one.

Our step-by-step walkthrough on what to do when a casino refuses to pay covers the tactical side of rungs one and two. This guide is about who sits on each rung and what they are actually empowered to do.

The Two Numbers That Set Your Expectations

Here is the reality check, from the only large ADR body that publishes proper statistics.

In its 2023-24 reporting year (1 October 2023 to 30 September 2024), the UK's Independent Betting Adjudication Service (IBAS) logged 3,223 domestic disputes plus 402 from overseas consumers. Of the cases it took through to completion:

• 49% of consumers received an outcome to their satisfaction.
• 6% – 94 cases out of 1,518 completed – were upheld in the player's favour by a written adjudication decision.

Both numbers are true, and the gap between them is the most useful thing in this guide. 645 cases ended in a settlement or an operator concession before any ruling was issued. In other words, the value of filing is mostly in the pressure it applies, not in the verdict you eventually get. Operators settle when a neutral third party starts asking questions with a file number attached.

The other half of the picture: 1,705 disputes (53%) were rejected or discontinued without conclusion. The biggest single reason was that the complaint was a regulatory matter rather than a transaction dispute (345 cases – self-exclusion failures mostly). Another 157 were thrown out because the operator was not registered with IBAS at all, and 40 arrived outside the 12-month time limit.

Regulator Routes, One by One

UK Gambling Commission (UKGC)

What it does: licenses and enforces. It collects consumer reports as intelligence and uses them to open compliance and enforcement cases against operators.

What it does not do: resolve your dispute or get your money back. The Commission is explicit that it does not make decisions on individual gambling transactions, and it will not intervene in or overturn an ADR provider's decision.

The route: complain to the operator. The business has 8 weeks to resolve it. After 8 weeks, or on receiving a final response you disagree with, you take it to one of the ADR providers approved by the Commission – free, independent, and the operator has to be signed up to one as a condition of its licence.

Worth doing anyway: yes. Report the licence breach separately from your ADR case. Complaint volume per operator is exactly the signal that triggers audits.

Malta Gaming Authority (MGA)

What it does: this is the regulator that will actually look at your individual case, through its Player Support Unit.

The timers on the operator side: an MGA licensee must inform you of the result of its inquiry within 10 days of receiving your complaint. That can be extended by a further 10 days only if the operator tells you inside the first 10 days that it needs longer, and gives reasons.

Then what: if you are unhappy with the operator's answer, you refer it to the MGA's Player Support Unit or to an approved ADR entity. The MGA's Player Support Committee resolved 85% of cases within two weeks in 2024, which is the fastest published turnaround of any route in this guide.

Reality check: the MGA mediates. It leans on the operator's licence conditions and its own player-protection rules, and licensees generally comply because a Malta licence is expensive to lose. It is not a court, and it will not award you damages.

Curaçao Gaming Authority (CGA)

The December 2024 LOK reform rebuilt this from nothing, and the complaints framework is now the most prescriptive part of it.

• Player Complaints Policy Guidelines v1.1, published 18 June 2025.
• ADR Role and Certification framework v1.0, published 10 September 2025.
• Responsible-gambling complaints: 5 business days.
• Standard complaints: 4 weeks, extendable once by another 4 weeks.
• Filing window: 6 months from the moment the dispute arises.
• The ADR provider must be CGA-certified, the operator funds it, and the decision is binding on the operator.

On paper those timers are stricter than Malta's. The catch is track record – the ADR certification framework only went live in September 2025, so there is not yet a meaningful body of published outcomes to judge it by. Also note that a legacy Curaçao sub-licence number (8048/JAZ and friends) is defunct in 2026, and none of this applies to a casino still displaying one.

Anjouan

Read this one carefully, because it is not what most players assume.

The Anjouan authority's own published policy states that it does not handle, mediate or adjudicate player complaints and will not correspond with players on the merits of individual cases. It supervises whether licensees maintain a working complaints process. That is the whole of its role in your dispute.

What it does mandate is ADR, and it makes the operator pay for it:

• Complaint goes to the operator first, through the complaint function on the site's licence seal.
• Game-outcome disputes must be raised within 14 calendar days of the session; account disputes – payments, suspensions, bonuses – within 30 calendar days.
• The operator has 30 calendar days to respond. Escalate before that expires and your case is out of scope.
• Then one of four approved ADR providers: EGIS ADR (Dubai), Axion ADR (Nevis), iGaming ADR (Isle of Man), CADRE B.V. (Curaçao). Free to you.

The ADR Bodies Compared

IBAS is an adjudication service. It rules. Its published compliance rate with rulings was 100% in 2023-24 and 99% the year before, and its average time from a complete case file to a published adjudication was 19 days, down from 22. It also took an average of 10 days to extract complete information from the gambling business – which tells you where the delay in your case is likely to come from. IBAS handled its 100,000th formal dispute in June 2025, having started in 1998.

eCOGRA is a mediation service, approved by the Great Britain Gambling Commission under the 2015 ADR regulations and by the MCCAA in Malta. It does not impose a decision – it works the two parties toward an agreed resolution using the operator's terms as the reference point. Average length 34 days, with a target of concluding within 90 days of issuing its Complete Case File notification. You get 7 days to add evidence after a preliminary resolution report and 30 days to request reconsideration on new evidence. Because it is non-binding, it does not restrict your right to go to court afterwards.

The practical difference: IBAS gives you a verdict that operators comply with, eCOGRA gives you a negotiated settlement. Neither costs you anything.

What None of Them Will Fix

Be realistic about the cases that die on arrival.

• You broke a term. Multiple accounts, bonus abuse, max-bet breaches during wagering, VPN play from a restricted country. ADR reads the terms first, and the terms are usually on the operator's side.
• Self-exclusion and responsible-gambling failures. These are regulatory matters, not transaction disputes – 345 of IBAS's rejections in 2023-24 fell in this bucket. Report them to the regulator instead, which is the body with the enforcement power.
• The operator is not signed up. 157 IBAS rejections in 2023-24 were simply because the operator was not registered. Check coverage before you spend three weeks assembling a file.
• Unlicensed sites. No licence, no ADR, no regulator. A licence verification before you deposit is the only reliable protection here, and it takes ten minutes.
• Crypto deposits. No chargeback equivalent exists. The ADR route is your only route.

The Evidence That Actually Wins Cases

Assemble this before you file anything. ADR bodies work from documents, and a thin file gets a fast rejection.

• Account transaction history – exported or screenshotted, showing the deposit, the win and the withdrawal request with timestamps.
• The withdrawal request itself – date, amount, method, and the status it is stuck in.
• Every support exchange – full live-chat transcripts (save them at the end of each chat, not later), emails with headers intact, agent names, dates.
• The formal complaint you sent and the operator's final response, or proof that no response arrived. This is the document that proves you completed rung one.
• A dated copy of the terms you played under – operators update terms, and a screenshot with a date beats an argument about which version applied. If a win was reversed after a glitch, also save the game round ID and a screenshot of the pay screen; our guide to reversed glitch wins shows what the courts focused on.
• KYC correspondence. Identity checks at the point of withdrawal generated 932 IBAS complaints in 2023-24, the second-largest category. If your hold is a verification hold, our KYC explainer covers what the operator can legitimately demand and what "reasonable" looks like.
• Your source-of-funds submission, if one was requested. Large wins routinely trigger these, and a well-documented one closes the argument fast – our source of funds guide includes a template you can adapt.

Realistic Timelines, End to End

Two deadlines run in the background while all this happens. Card chargebacks generally allow around 120 days from the transaction date, and that clock does not pause for your ADR case – so diarise it the day you file your first complaint. IBAS enforces a 12-month limit, and eCOGRA refuses cases more than a year after the operator's internal process concluded.

When to Give Up on Complaining and Use Your Bank

If the operator has stonewalled, the ADR route has closed, and you funded the account by card, the casino chargeback route is the last rung. It is a genuine option and also a one-way door: expect the account closed, any remaining balance forfeited, and the operator to flag you with its payment processor, which can follow you to sister brands on the same platform.

Do it in the right order. Banks want evidence you exhausted the merchant's own process, and a dispute filed while an ADR case is live tends to get bounced. The complaint reference numbers and written responses you collected on rungs one to three are exactly the evidence a chargeback claim needs, so the ladder works in your favour.

Bottom line: the complaint is worth filing even when the odds of a formal ruling in your favour are one in sixteen, because the settlement rate is what pays out. Get your evidence in order, check your operator is covered before you start, and mind the clocks.

FAQ

Who do I complain to if a casino won't pay me?

The operator first – that is a licence condition and every other route will check you did it. Then the ADR provider your operator is signed up to, which is free to you and paid for by the operator. The regulator comes third and, in Great Britain, will not decide your case at all. Save a card chargeback for last, and only if you deposited by card.

What is the difference between a regulator complaint and an ADR complaint?

An ADR provider reviews the evidence in your specific dispute and produces an outcome – a ruling or a mediated settlement. A regulator polices licence conditions. The UK Gambling Commission is explicit that it does not resolve individual transaction disputes and cannot recover your money, though it does use reports as enforcement intelligence. The Malta Gaming Authority is the main exception: its Player Support Unit does review individual cases.

How likely am I to win a casino complaint?

In IBAS's 2023-24 year, 49% of consumers who reached an outcome got one they were satisfied with, but only 94 of 1,518 completed cases – about 6% – were upheld by a written adjudication in the player's favour. Most successful outcomes were settlements or operator concessions reached before any ruling. Roughly 53% of disputes were rejected or discontinued entirely, often because the operator was not covered or the issue was a regulatory matter rather than a transaction dispute.

Is an ADR decision binding on the casino?

It depends on the provider. IBAS issues adjudications that registered operators are expected to honour, and its published compliance rate was 100% in 2023-24. eCOGRA runs non-binding mediation – it does not impose a decision, and you keep the right to go to court afterwards. Curaçao's CGA-certified ADR decisions are binding on the operator under the LOK framework.

What if the casino is licensed offshore in Anjouan or Curaçao?

Curaçao gives you a binding, CGA-certified ADR route with a 6-month filing window and a 4-week clock. Anjouan mandates ADR too – four approved providers, operator-funded – but the Anjouan authority states outright that it will not mediate or adjudicate your complaint and will not correspond with you on the merits. On either jurisdiction, identify the ADR provider before you deposit rather than after.

Is there a deadline for complaining?

Several, and they run at the same time. IBAS applies a 12-month limit. eCOGRA refuses disputes more than a year after the operator's internal process closed. Curaçao's window is 6 months from the dispute arising. Anjouan wants game-outcome disputes raised within 14 days of the session and account disputes within 30 days. Card chargebacks are typically around 120 days from the transaction date, not from the refusal.