Following our discussion of unfair gaming software in our previous tip, we would now like to shed more insight on what to look for when seeking out online casinos that are compliant with ongoing fairness and security regulations. It is necessary to put emphasis on the word "ongoing", for there are some casinos out there claiming to be fair and in compliance with minimum payout percentages.

What some of these sites are suspected  of doing is spiff up their operations for a month, obtain a legitimate payout report, publish the report for all their site visitors to see, and in the meantime, cease all future audits and hit their unsuspecting players up with unfavorable odds.

For example, we recently came across an online casino that had a payout percentage report on their site from over a year ago. The link that led to this report was entitled "Fairness". So what? This only proves they had these payouts during that particular month over a year ago. This does not guarantee the payouts are going to be the same for the current month.

This is what we mean when we say "ongoing" compliance. When looking at payout percentage reports, which should always be prepared by independent third party auditors (Price Waterhouse Coopers and Technical Systems Testing are two of the industry's leading auditors), be sure they are for recent months.

Granted, it takes at least the month after to prepare the report, resulting in maybe one or two months delay before the previous month's report gets published. However, depending on how long the casino has been in operation, a truly transparent site will have payout reports available for all months prior.

While this is one of the most certain ways to verify ongoing fairness compliance, there is yet an even newer protocol called Total Gaming Transaction Review, which was recently introduced by eCOGRA. We will go into more detail regarding this in our next tip.