Bonus Bandit and the push for sweepstakes transparency, with Noah Rafkin

Sweepstakes casinos operate with little regulation, and players often cannot tell which sites pay out. Bonus Bandit founder Noah Rafkin, who built an independent accountability site for US sweepstakes casinos, explains his trust scores and what he found behind one network of brands on The Gambling Files.

In this episode

• Rafkin soft-launched in late May and says Bonus Bandit ranks about 230 sites on a 0 to 100 trust score; the methodology is public and "100% mechanical" (8:17, 11:55, 12:02).

• The score has seven weighted factors, led by redemption; others include terms and conditions, KYC and public sentiment from roughly 500,000 cataloged Trustpilot reviews (17:32, 17:48, 18:25, 19:33, 20:05).

• He open-sourced all his data under CC BY on Kaggle and GitHub, saying it should not be gate-kept (15:18, 15:33).

• A subset of sites now cap what you can take out of free play at $25 lifetime, even after a $2,000 jackpot, he says (32:41, 32:44).

• When he requested his data, 10 of about 12 sites had privacy emails that bounced (39:42).

• He traced one network of about 15 sister sites to two LLCs organised by the same person and registered in a small Wyoming town (36:35, 42:12, 42:23).

Episode from The Gambling Files (RTFM) by Jon Bruford and Fintan Costello, published on YouTube.