We were stunned to read of an alleged bingo scam today in the Mirror newspaper involving internet bingo giants Gala Bingo. According to the article in the national newspaper two members of staff at the Gala Bingo club in Pallion, Sunderland have been suspended following allegations of a £10,000 bingo scam at the land based bingo hall.
Management at the Gala Bingo club become suspicious of the alleged bingo scam when a staff member, believed to be the caller’s girlfriend, called bingo and won a substantial amount of money. Gala Bingo have informed the Gaming Commission of the alleged bingo scam but, according to the Mirror article, have yet to inform the police pending the completion of their internal investigation.
It has long been believed that game fixing and this sort of bingo scam was not possible since the introduction of random number generators but it is thought that a secret code was used to generate a set of numbers rather than the usual randomly generated ones.
Although the £10,000 that was won in the alleged bingo scam game is small in comparison with the highest prize pot of £600,000 in the High 5 Bingo game the relationship between the caller and the winner raised suspicion enough for someone to report the incident. An immediate investigation was carried out following the suggestion of a bingo scam and this led to the suspension of on member of staff and the dismissal of another.
At least as internet bingo players we know that this is highly unlikely to happen at an online bingo site; all of the random number generators used in internet bingo have to be independently checked by a third party under the strict licensing conditions set out by the commissions for the white list of internet bingo sites.