Mona VIP Casino: A Scam You Should Avoid At All Cost
Outrageous Terms and Conditions, slow and non-payments, unresponsive customer support…
Name a problem that signifies an online casino is rogue, and sure enough – Mona VIP Casino has it. However, this shouldn’t be a surprise, since they belong to a group of casinos run by an operator known for its fraudulent and rogue behavior.
General Information
Mona VIP is another on the list of rogue casinos operated by the Morriyen N.V. group out of Costa Rica with the same amoral management that’s behind the Rome Casino, infamous for cheating their players by removing the Wild symbols from the reels on several different slots.
The two casinos share the same payment department and customer service, so you can expect to run into similar problems while playing at both of them. The main issues concerning the Mona VIP casino are its predatory terms and conditions as well as painfully slow payments.
So, unless you intend to simply hand over your money to this rogue operator, we strongly suggest avoiding Mona VIP Casino and other rogue pits run by the Morriyen crooks.
First Impression
After a quick glance at the other “VIP” sites run by this group, it becomes apparent that they’re little more than clones of each other. The Mona VIP casino is arguably the worst of the bunch, with a horrible theme and a tedious design.
Their website looks like it’s been scrapped together in five minutes by a graphic designer in training. The categories are in the middle of the page, under the giant banner, and look like they’ve been poorly cropped and pasted there.
It’s almost as if they intended to provide short descriptions for each of the categories but were too lazy to actually do it. Now, there’s just a missing section in the dead center of the page, with nothing but the background there. The navigation, as a whole, is atrocious. It’s all over the place, and the font is so tiny that half of it is barely visible.
Furthermore, there’s no mention of any gambling license present on the website. Instead, where the information about the jurisdiction should be, there are two lines about “special treatment” of their “loyal players.”
The Bonuses
The bonuses Mona VIP Casino advertises on its homepage are sticky, meaning they can never be withdrawn. The wagering requirements for deposit bonuses are 25x deposit + bonus. In case of free bonus, the requirements go up to 99x the bonus amount.
The signup bonuses are where Mona’s T&C get weird really fast. On their website, they openly state that neither the signup bonus nor the winnings you get from it can ever be withdrawn.
Take the time to digest that. They offer a signup bonus as an incentive to play at the casino. Yet, the bonus is apparently meaningless, since anything you win with it “doesn’t count.” In fact, the winnings from the signup bonus are apparently “exchanged” as an “extra first deposit bonus” of 100% up to $100.
So, whether you win $5, $50 or $500,000 with the signup bonus, it doesn’t matter. You can only get a maximum of $100 as an “extra” first deposit bonus. The problem is this $100 is also sticky and will be deducted from your balance when you request a payout.
Confusing? Certainly. Rogue? Definitely.
In case all of this wasn’t enough to turn you away from this wretched casino, their predatory Terms and Conditions will certainly do.
New Terms, Same B.S.
Until recently, Mona VIP Casino had the typical Morriyen terms, the same as Grand Luxe before shutting down. To give you the gist of it, the withdrawal limit was $1,500 per payout, and you could only request one withdrawal at a time.
The entire process typically lasted for over a month. These limitations also applied to progressive jackpots. In other words, it took forever to claim your winnings, if they were even paid in the first place.
After an overwhelming amount of player complaints regarding their terms, and the fact that they had to close 2 casinos, the operators finally figured out that these T&C weren’t going to fly.
So, instead of shutting down Mona VIP, which would’ve been a much better option in our opinion, they came up with new terms. Funny thing is – they’re arguably even worse.
Now, the maximum withdrawals are based on the player’s VIP level. There are six different levels from Bronze to Ultimate Plus, ranging from $1,000 to $35,0000 weekly, which means, in theory, new members are capped at $4,000 a month.
We say in theory because you can’t request a new payout before the preceding one has been completed. Although a slight improvement from the previous terms, it still takes up to 3 days for the casino to review your request, and then up to 12 business days for the payment to be finalized. And that’s without the delays Mona Casino is infamous for.
The maximum withdrawals for playing with bonuses are also capped at $200 for Bronze, $500 for Silver, and $1,000 for other VIP levels. Furthermore, Mona defines advantage betting and systematic betting as bonus abuse and their Security Department may declare any player a “high risk,” and automatically decline all payout requests.
Games and Software
Although Mona VIP previously provided games by Betsoft, Rival, NetEnt and other major software developers, they’ve made a switch, and their casino is now powered exclusively by Pragmatic Play.
Pragmatic Play used to be known as TopGame, but rebranded in 2015 after they’ve earned an awful reputation, mainly thanks to their association with rogue casinos like Mona VIP. What’s interesting is that the casino’s website copy wasn’t changed after the developer’s rebrand. Mona still claims to be powered by the “leading gaming software provider” – TopGame.
Regardless of name change, Pragmatic Play is definitely a downgrade. Both the variety and the quality of their games are inferior to games Mona VIP Casino used to provide. The games they currently have in their repertoire aren’t bad by any means, but they aren’t exactly top-tier either.
The library of Mona VIP Casino offers just over 70 different games, which is on the low end of the scale when online casinos are concerned. Most of these games are mediocre classic slots with a handful of video slots, several video poker variants and a few other table games thrown into the mix.
Oh, and you have to download the client in order to play Mona VIP’s games. There is no instant play available at Mona VIP casino, which appears to be a standard practice with casinos powered exclusively by Pragmatic Play, albeit a little annoying.
Overall, the selection of games at Mona VIP Casino is a bit lackluster. Anyway, you shouldn’t be playing in a casino with a rich history of delaying payments and relying on dodgy terms to void players winnings. If you’re particularly fond of Pragmatic Play’s games, it’s best to find a more reputable casino to play in.
User Experience
While searching for user reviews of this casino on the web, the first thing we run into are hundreds of comments from players warning others that this casino is a scam. The sheer number of complaints directed towards Mona VIP casino suggests unethical and rogue behavior.
The main issue players experienced with this casino are incredibly slow payments and non-payments. Typical of a casino run by the Morriyen N.V. group, Mona VIP employed various stalling strategies and hid behind their preposterous terms and conditions in an effort to scam people out of the legitimate winnings.
The customer support was professional and welcoming before you registered your account, yet weirdly unresponsive and rude once you tried to cash out. You would even receive emails telling you that you’ve got $100 or even $200 in your account even before you started playing at the casino.
Of course, as soon as you went to withdraw your winnings, you would hit an insurmountable wall. They would either make something up and call upon their ridiculous T&C to wipe your account, or if they couldn’t fabricate anything – simply never respond.
Being familiar with this notorious group, it didn’t surprise us to find that Mona’s attitude towards their players was horrible. This rogue management doesn’t care about anything other than lining their pockets with players’ deposits. They’re running multiple different casinos, scamming people left and right.
Pros and Cons
PROS None whatsoever | CONS Operated by a rogue group infamous for scamming their playersPainfully slow withdrawal processNon-paymentsPredatory Terms and ConditionsAwful websiteHorrible customer support that perpetuates the scam |
Verdict
It’s not an overstatement when we say that this is one of the worst casinos you could be playing in. So, we strongly suggest that you avoid the Mona VIP Casino at all costs.
However, you shouldn’t only avoid Mona VIP, but all other casinos operated or associated with the Morriyen group. The operators are known for not paying and leveraging questionable Terms and Conditions to claim players’ winnings for themselves.
The other currently operational casinos belonging to this group are Diamond VIP casino and Rome VIP casino. Grand Luxe and Topaze have been shut down several years ago.
Another thing worth noting is that Morriyen group might also operate under a different name – CyberRock Entertainment N.V. Although the evidence isn’t conclusive, they have the same T&C, withdrawal limitations and terribly long processes (15-18 days) for payment requests.
So, just to be on the safe side, avoid all of the casinos under the management of the two groups mentioned above.
Rating
Customer support: 1/10
Cashout time: 1/10
Software: 5/10
Jurisdiction: 6/10
Total: 3/10