- This is a good quality website with a long pedigree in the business, you can trust BGO online casino
- There’s a wide range of games
- Good live casino games
- Free BGO app available to mobile players from reputable sources
- A wide range of BGO games, but other sites have many more
- There is a relatively small range of payment methods
- Fees on withdrawals are large
BGO Casino Review
Welcome to our BGO Casino review. BGO earned their stripes in the British bingo market, where they carved out a distinctive identity with a series of TV ads featuring Verne Troyer, the late star probably now best known for his somewhat colourful, and sometimes difficult, personal life, and his casting as Mini-Me in the Austin Powers movies.
Bingo occupies a strange place in the online gambling world. The game – certainly in the UK and US – have a decidedly unglamorous image, and – in contrast to most online gambling – is generally marketed at women. Sites have a strong social aspect, with chat rooms de riguer.
But bingo is still a gambling game, and you can still win very big prizes playing a game that was once the subject of massive newspaper wars in the UK. And almost all bingo sites feature loads of slot games, usually available to players as “side games” in chat rooms.
Since 2012, BGO has been operating as a full-on casino site, with around 660 games on our visit. It uses Playtech as its base operating software provider, so it’s immediately got one of the biggest names in the industry on its side.
Its front page is fairly standard, with a page full of tiles of the slots it offers dominating the look. At the top stand the welcome offers and a menu offering shortcuts to all the styles of gambling that this UK casino site offers: bingo, of course, live games, promotions, its loyalty programme, and the latest BGO casino promotions.
Scroll down through the slots and you’ll see a choice of live games – all presented by dealers in silver dresses; fair enough, you have to choose a look we suppose!
Then there’s a big blog of text trying to sell the site’s virtues – hopefully, we’ll provide all the information you need in this review, but we hope that you head over to the site to have a look around too.
Let’s take a closer look now at what this bingo convert can offer to slots and casino players in our BGO Casino review.
BGO Casino Pros
- This is a good quality website with a long pedigree in the business, you can trust BGO online casino
- There’s a wide range of games
- Good live casino games
- Free BGO app available to mobile players from reputable sources
BGO Casino Cons
- A wide range of BGO games, but other sites have many more
- There is a relatively small range of payment methods
- Fees on withdrawals are large
Is BGO Casino Safe?
We’ve already given you our initial impression. That’s that BGO online casino is absolutely safe. That’s a conclusion come to just by looking at the site, and it’s not something you should shy away from.
The truth is that people who fall victims to outright scamming, things like fake sites that funnel your money off to some off-shore account and never see an honest game, as a result, are very often vulnerable in some way. They may be desperate to win money to get around a financial problem; they may be trying to get around restrictions on their gambling because of addiction or to get around age limits. But the sad truth that has long been established around cons – we’re happy to recommend the excellent book The Big Con by David Maurer if you’re interested in this stuff – is that the victim plays a role in the deception themselves.
If you allow yourself to think about what you’re doing and make a dispassionate assessment of a site then we think you are unlikely to fall for too many cons, most of which are relatively unsophisticated. It is with this part in mind that we’re very keen to recommend safe gambling practices: not to play while intoxicated, not to play when distressed, not to play when in financial trouble, not to play in order to alter your feelings or to deal with a problem. Following these guidelines (which we’re pleased to see signposted on BGO Casino’s site) will not only help keep problem gambling at bay, it will also make you, we believe, less vulnerable to scams.
But we like to go deeper than that here, and the next step is to check out BGO Casino’s licensing.
The company is based in Alderney in the Channel Islands and has an Alderney Gambling Control Commission licence. It also has – as any site that is used by UK players must have – a UK Gambling Commission licence. It is licence number 39533, which confirms that it is legal for the company (BGO Entertainment Limited) to offer bingo and casino gambling to UK casino players.
However, there is a note on the licence. The company was warned on 31st March 2017 and given a financial penalty of £350,000. The offence, in this case, was related to advertising.
Obviously, it is not great to have a mark against your licence, but you’d probably be surprised how common it is (of the sites we’ve reviewed recently only one of them did not have a note). In this case, the offence was a long time ago and has not been repeated.
We’ll also throw in our own two pence worth here: the standard of advertising in the gambling industry, in general, is not great. Our advice to players is to be aware, to be well informed (read sites like ours!), and to assume that almost all claims and promises have some hidden cost to the player and don’t expect to actually get anything for free.
Beyond licensing, BGO online casino has good-quality payment options with respected firms. It also boasts SSL Encryption and produces a nice green light from the browsers we used to visit the site.
As part of the joining process, you will be asked to verify your identity properly. This means sending ID documents to BGO by email. The documents the site accepts are driving licences, national ID cards, passports, or UK Citizen Cards (for UK customers). You’ll also need to send in a proof of your address, in the form of a letter to your address from some reputable business.
With those sort of documents in their hands, you want to know that they’re in safe hands. There is a full privacy policy outlined in the site’s FAQs, including an address for the site’s data protection officer (dpo@bgo.com). Do feel free to use this contact by the way. You are entitled to know what information websites hold on you.
These are all great signs and only add to our conviction that you can play at BGO Casino with confidence that your money and date will be safe and that the games will be honest.
BGO Casino Welcome Bonus in the UK
A good welcome bonus is the minimum players expect these days. This is a very competitive market, and if a site wants you to play with them, then they need to give you plenty of good reasons.
The current UK BGO welcome bonus headline offer is this:
100% bonus up to £200 on first deposit. Or “get up to 50 free spins on first deposit”.
Both look great, but how does the small print look?
As usual, it looks long, complicated and frightening to new players! Don’t worry though, this is all standard stuff in the casino industry – for good or evil – and BGO’s terms aren’t at all out of the ordinary.
They include, on the 50-Free-Spins offer, a minimum deposit of £10 (the site uses codes to unlock bonuses, in this case, “50FS”). For each pound over £10 that you deposit, you’ll get a free spin, up to the maximum of 50. You can use these spins only on a selection of games, though we’re pleased to say that they’re great games: Starburst, Finn and the Swirly Spins, Aloha! Cluster Pays, and Wild Wild West: Great Train Heist. The spins are valued at 10p and last for three days.
Winnings from these free spins are added to your cash balance. There are no restrictions on withdrawing these winnings.
The 100% match offer is for live casino and table games, which you can opt into with the code “LIVE” after making a deposit of at least £20. Your spending with bonus funds is limited to roulette, blackjack, three-card brag, casino hold ‘em, and spin-a-win games in both live and virtual games.
Once you opt-in, your BGO casino bonus is ring-fenced and limited to casino games. Betting will be limited in stake size too. The welcome bonus lasts just for seven days.
All limits are lifted after you have met the “wagering requirement”. This is something that you will find at any site and it limits what you can do with bonus funds until you have put a multiple of your own money into the site. In this case, there is a 40-times wagering requirement, helpfully explained as: “if you have deposited £50 and received a Welcome Bonus of £50 your wagering requirement is £2,000.”
Not all BGO casino games are equal in the world of wagering requirements though, and wagering on different games counts towards your wagering requirement at different levels, for example, betting on blackjack games counts at a level of 20%. So, if you want to play just blackjack, your wagering requirement will go up by a factor of five. That’s £10,000 you’ll need to play on that £50 deposit.
OK, that sounds awful when compared to the headline offer. Sadly, that is just the way the casino business operates, and it’s why we urge our players to not pay all that much attention to welcome offers. In our opinion, you are best advised to consider this money as a way to take a tour of the site without risking your own money. Don’t put too much store on using it to win big wedges of cash at no cost – though, that’s not impossible.
BGO Casino Promotions
A good welcome offer is a good start, but to keep players playing a UK casino site is going to need to give you reasons to come back.
BGO Casino does well at this, as befits a site with its roots in the social and promotion-heavy of bingo.
There’s a no deposit welcome bonus of a kind, which will give you 10 free spins if you sign up and confirm your mobile phone number. As with all “free” offers, we’d urge you to be realistic about this. This is being offered to you because the site believes you’ll stay well beyond the 10 free spins and spend multiples of the value of those spins and any money you win. That said, there are no restrictions on withdrawing the cash you win from those spins. We’ve checked the small print and we can’t find any catches.
Then you can play slot tournaments. All you need to do is to be on the tournaments page at the start time of the game. Then you’ll be given the spins you need to play. The spins are free, and there are no in-game prizes, but the player with the best game performance win free spins (mostly 100 spins) at the end of the game.
Beyond this, there is a massive roster of promotions, many of them offering big, real-money prizes like holidays. Again, this is something that BGO bring to casino gaming from the bingo world and we think it’s completely good news. A loyalty programme allows you to collect “diamonds” by betting, which you can save up and spend on a loyalty programme store.
BGO Casino Games and Software
BGO has a great big selection of games, covering most styles and genres.
It is a Playtech casino, so you’ll expect to find those games front and centre, but they also have games from around 25 other developers. Gaming moves so quickly these days that it’s impossible to keep up to date with numbers of games at a site so you’ll need to keep checking back if you want to see what they’ve got.
BGO games are shown on the front page, with slots at the top, which you can arrange by popularity, and release date. Then you can separate out the casino games, and the live games. There’s a separate tab for big jackpot games.
BGO Slots
While BGO doesn’t have quite the selection of games that some other sites do, it’s hardly short of them.
The most popular BGO games are some of the biggest names in the whole industry: Starburst, Spin Doctor, Mermaid Queen, Undead Rich, and Fluffy Favourites (this is a real sign of the company’s bingo roots, as this is pretty much the undisputed king of bingo slots, with its big local progressive jackpots).
New BGO slots were pouring in to on our visit, with Centurion, Super Hot Fruits, The Love Guru, Turn Your Fortune, and Ways of the Phoenix at the top of the charts.
The big jackpot games start with White Wizard, Irish Luck, and Stampede (all new at the site), before Age of the Gods, Superman, Jackpot Giant and Cleopatra. The prizes for these games – that were posted – were all over £500,000, with Mega Fortune offering a jackpot of £1,292,369.
Other BGO Casino Games
Casino games aren’t very clearly labelled at BGO Casino. The casino tab brings up a load of slot games but also includes the blackjack and roulette lobbies.
The company has obviously put a lot of effort into its live casino games, and the silver dresses and waistcoats that go with them. You’ll find Blackjack, roulette, hi-lo, casino hold ‘em, and baccarat game lobbies waiting for you, with betting limits shown, and a big choice of game variants.
Banking
Most players play at casinos in order to win cash. So you need a way to put it safely into your account and quickly get it out.
Please always use good practice on internet security, particularly on password use, whenever you send money online. This site is doing its part, but it all falls apart if your password is your name and you don’t log out of sites properly when you use a shared machine. All that boring security advice is very much worth following.
So, knowing that it’s safe, how do you cash up and cash out at BGO?
Among the current payment methods allowed at BGO are some of the biggest names in payment processing. You can use these currencies if you’re operating internationally: Euros, pounds sterling, Norwegian kroner, and Swedish kronor.
The listed payment methods in the terms and conditions are Visa, Mastercard, PayPal, Maestro, Skrill, and Neteller. This is a very small selection by modern standards, but they’re all gold-seal companies that you can trust with your money.
The minimum deposit is £10 and you can set deposit limits if you like as part of the safe-gaming policies.
Withdrawals are quick but do have a 24-hour delay on all transactions, during which time you can change your mind and leave the money in the account. The withdrawals of money can take three to five days for bank and card payments but will be instant to the electronic wallets.
PayPal is a great sign at this site. The giant of online payment companies doesn’t partner with many online casino companies, and it’s a sign that the company can be trusted that they are seen here.
Fees are charged for withdrawals. There is a fee of £2.50 for all withdrawals and 2.5% (with a minimum of 50p) on all withdrawals under £500. That’s not great when a lot of sites offer completely free banking services.
BGO Customer Support
Help! Screaming at your screen or smashing up your phone might seem an attractive option when a site seems to do you wrong, but the best option is to take a deep breath, and head to the company’s help pages.
BGO casinos customer support offering opens with an excellent set of FAQs on its help page – though this isn’t always easy to find – and is backed up with a full set of contact methods.
Live chat, phone and email are available from 8.30 am to midnight. Or, if you read from the actual help page it’s available from 7 am to 1 am. We do our best with our reviews, and all we can do when sites have contradictory information on their sites is report everything we find, note it, and shake our heads.
The site can be called on 0330 094 8055, live chat is accessed via a click, and email help is via a form on the BGO casino help page.
The Final Verdict
BGO casino is one of the most successful sites in the UK market. It’s easy to see why. It has good quality games, excellent bonuses and social aspects that go well beyond just slapping a big welcome offer on the front page into a continuing reward programme and regular and imaginative promos.
There are no reasons not to check out this site – perhaps by downloading the app. It’s safe and secure and you’ll find every sort of game. If you like to play live casino games then you’ll love BGO! The added bonus of a linked bingo empire may or may not tempt you.
There are negatives though. The withdrawal fees are steep and there aren’t that many ways to pay in or collect money from the site. Putting money in a “pending” state for 24 hours after you’ve asked for it to be withdrawn feels like a tricky way to get you to change your mind, or to keep it in the casino’s accounts rather than in its player’s.
The design can feel a little tired, too, and navigation isn’t always so good.
Those minor problems aside – which we’ve Found variations of at almost every casino site on the wide wide world of the web – we’re still happy to recommend BGO to our readers. Bits and pieces of the experience are a bit off, but overall this is obviously a site that wants to please its customers and to give them a great time.
This is just a review though, the best way to see whether BGO online casino is for you is to check out is unique free spins no-deposit/no-restrictions welcome offer and take a browse around.
All UK Online Casino Reviews updated 2021
