Scams

Fake proof of winnings, and the details that give it away

Every scheme on these pages needs evidence, because nobody pays for a system or deposits at an unknown site without seeing someone else win first. The evidence costs almost nothing to make, and the details below are where it most often gives itself away (to an eye that knows where to look).

Screenshots

A web page can be edited in any browser before it is photographed (the "developer tools" that come with every browser let anyone change a balance, a name or a date on the screen), so a screenshot of a large balance or an approved withdrawal proves only that someone took a screenshot. The same is true of bank notifications and transfer confirmations, which are easy to imitate with a template and impossible to check from a picture. A picture is not a record.

The details that give such pictures away are small: fonts or spacing differing between two lines of the same screen, a currency that does not match the story (euros in a tale about Calgary), a missing date or time, and an "address bar" cropped out of the frame. A screenshot that hides the address of the site hides the one detail that could be checked against the AiGC list, which is reason enough to distrust it.

Videos and generated images

A video is only a screenshot with a timeline, and an editor can remove the losing hours between two winning minutes without leaving a visible mark. Images and voices can now be generated by software as well, which means that a smiling winner holding a cheque, or a well-known person recommending an app, may never have existed in that form at all, however natural it looks.

If you run a "reverse image search" (most search engines offer one), the same winner may turn up on other sites, under other names and with other sums.

Play money

Play money photographs well. A win in a demo looks exactly like a win with money, and some proof videos are filmed in "practice mode", where the balance is play money (handed out freely by the provider to anyone who opens the game). Two of our own demo sessions began with a balance of 25,000.00, a round figure of the kind to look for, together with any "demo", "fun" or "practice" label at the edge of the screen, and the page on playing in demo explains what else a demo cannot show.

Sponsored streams

Some streamed sessions are played with money that a casino provides under a "sponsorship deal", or on accounts with terms that ordinary players do not get, which changes what a loss means to the person on screen. A stream that does not say who pays for the balance (in its description, or on screen) should be watched as what it may well be, an advert!

Certificates and approvals

Some sites and sellers add documents to the pictures: a "certificate of fairness", an "audit" of a system, or a page announcing that a withdrawal has been "approved" and will arrive soon. None of them is evidence to us, because the only approval that matters in the province is a row on the list, and a withdrawal is proved by money in a bank account, not by a message promising it.

Testimonials and reviews

Testimonials with a first name, a city and a sum (usually a round one) are cheap to write, and pages of five-star praise posted in the same week are cheap to buy. We publish no testimonials and no ratings of our own; where our reviews show an average from a public review site, the site is named, with the number of reviews behind it.

Winners on display

Even a genuine screenshot is a selection, because the people posting wins do not post the deposits that came before them, and a channel with ten thousand members (or a hundred thousand) can show a winner every day while most of its members lose. That is the arithmetic of the return to player seen from outside: a game keeping a few per cent of everything staked still produces a steady supply of winners to photograph.

What to do with proof

We would treat any proof offered by a seller as part of the "sales pitch", and check the site rather than the screenshot against the list, every time. The only evidence worth having is what a third party with no stake in the sale confirms (the row on the list, the written terms, the game's arithmetic).

If a picture was used to take money from you, keep it, together with the account or channel that posted it, and report both to the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre (1-888-495-8501, or online) and to the platform; the page on online gambling scams lists the other calls.

By the Alberta Casinos Online editorial team · Last updated: November 13, 2026 · Online since 2026