Are Online Slots Rigged?

by James Carter on February 19th 2015.

Many of us have been excited about playing slots at some point, only to find the excitement quickly turning into disappointment. Nothing seems to work. Only small wins and not even a single bonus game. You feel cheated.

Was the slot machine rigged?

In all honesty, it could have been. If you played at one of the reputable real-money online casinos, however, it probably wasn’t. You just happened to be on the bad side of variance (in the long run, you should lose a lot of money at slot machines anyway).

And we’ll never truly know. Since you’re supposed to lose at slot machines and online casinos have no obligations to share their payback percentages, they could run their machines at ridiculously low returns and we wouldn’t have the slightest clue about it.

Many people will tell you that rigged online slots are rare because online casinos have no reason to cheat; they make so much money from slot machines already simply by offering fair games.

That’s far from a convicing argument – as if there were no greedy people in the world. But there’s some logic behind the argument as well. Since the casino already has an edge over the player, the only thing they need is to get more players. Cheating slot machine players out of their money is hardly a good way to get new sign-ups.

In a sense it’s hard to define “rigged online slots” since technically an online casino doesn’t cheat if it has ridiculously low payout percentages set to its slot machines.

But we should treat them the same as if they were cheating.

How to Find Safe Online Casinos

The solution I’ve come-up with is to play at reputable sites that have reputable private auditors testing their RNGs and payout percentages. Even better if the private auditor has been allowed to publish how much the online casino has paid out monthly.

Still, one could argue that you never know if online casinos bribe private auditors to creating good reports. True. We’ll never know for sure.

But if you believe that there are online casinos without rigged slots, why not trust the ones that are willing to let auditors publish their results for everyone to see? The ones that seemingly have nothing to be ashamed of?

If I were to run an honest online casino with no rigged slot machines, why wouldn’t I publish payout reports? Why would I let anyone think that I could have rigged online slots at my casino?

By the way, one of the ways to keep an eye on dishonest, cheating online casinos is to look at internet blacklists, such as the one at Casinomeister.com.