PlayAUD Casino

PlayAUD Casino Review

PlayAUD Casino is one of the strangest websites we’ve ever come across. On the surface, it just looks like a regular casino that is targeting Australian players – it’s even right there in the title, a site where you play with AUD! Couldn’t be simpler! Except… the site seems to be based in China, as it offers a Chinese language option and accepts Chinese players in addition to Australian ones. So, is this an Australian or Chinese casino? And if it’s trying to be both, why?

Those are the questions we set about answering when we first opened the PlayAUD Casino home page! On top of that, we also wanted to see if it’s an actually worthwhile casino in terms of its bonuses, games, and, most importantly, safety. Chinese or Australian, it doesn’t matter – what matters is that it’s safe and legal, right?

So, should you truly PlayAUD, or should you instead quickly GetOUT?

Bonuses

No Deposit Bonus – Free AU$28

The art of the no deposit bonus is sadly a lost one in modern online casinos, so it was genuinely a surprise to us to see that PlayAUD Casino had one of those in store! And on one hand, this is a pretty great bonus in theory – with some strict wagering requirements, sure, but that’s to be expected. But on the other hand, we’re honestly doubtful of whether it even exists.

When you first sign up, you’ll be able to get a whoppin AU$28 as bonus cash before you’ve ever had to deposit even a cent of your own money. That bonus can only be used to “play Mario slots game”, whatever that means – and this is our major red flag, because no matter how hard we looked, we couldn’t find a way to “play Mario slots game”. We have seen certain slots using unlicensed Nintendo characters at other casinos (like Donkey Kong, who is from the same series of Nintendo games as Mario), but we didn’t even find that here.

Granted, it’s entirely possible that there is, indeed, some pokie named “Mario” here, and that we simply didn’t find it among all the others. Sadly, not even the customer support could help us out, for reasons we’ll get into later. Whatever the case, if you’re luckier than us and actually manage to find the game in question, keep in mind that you’ll need to play with your no deposit bonus until you accumulate AU$400, and then you’ll be able to withdraw AU$20 from it.

Welcome Bonus – 50% Match

The no deposit bonus of PlayAUD Casino, should it exist, was at least very straightforward – you get this amount, you need to wager it that many times, you can withdraw this much. Simple! The same can’t be said for the welcome bonus whose description may stump even the greatest minds of our time.

Reading the title, you may be thinking one of two things: “isn’t 50% way too little for a welcome bonus” or “50% up to what?” The answer to the former is “yes”, and to the latter is “we don’t know”. The casino never once specifies what its maximum bonus is, only the minimum deposit you need to make in order to claim it (which is AU$30).

Instead of providing us with basic information that is necessary to understand how the bonus even works, the casino delves into “deposit rollover” and “minimum turnover”, confusing terms that may be a lot more meaningful to a Chinese audience, but are all but foreign to us Aussies. We’re used to wagering requirements, and while “minimum turnover” appears to be close enough, it’s not quite the case – it seems to be referring to a maximum withdrawal. The whole thing is incomprehensible.

Reload Promotions at PlayAUD Casino

Okay, okay, so both the no deposit offer and welcome bonus were a bust… but surely the reload promotions are going to be decent, right? Well, the good news is that they’re quite numerous, and very diverse. The bad news is that “decent” isn’t exactly how we wold describe them.

For example, you’ll be able to get an unlimited bonus to use on pokies – unlimited, as in, it doesn’t matter how much money you deposit, you will always get the maximum bonus possible. Pretty cool, right? Until you realize that this maximum bonus will be between 5% and 10% of your deposit. Imagine depositing AU$200 and only getting AU$10 back!

You’ll also get daily challenges, referral bonuses, even one-time offers for things like downloading the PlayAUD Casino app, and yet none of them feel particularly worthwhile. It’s honestly disappointing because it’s clear that at least a little bit of thought went into those offers – but as they stand right now, we just can’t imagine anyone claiming any of them.

Games

Even though the bonuses of PlayAUD Casino weren’t quite what we wanted to see, any gambling site’s bread and butter comes from its games, not arbitrary things like bonuses! Surely PlayAUD’s game library is big and diverse enough to accommodate all sorts of players… Right?

As you can imagine, that isn’t the case at all. We won’t discuss the pokies right now (we’ve dedicated a whole section to them just below), but there really isn’t much here besides them. Just a very limited live betting section and a handful of table games. While PlayAUD Casino does technically offer sports betting, that section was empty for us – which means that it’s possible that this is a leftover design element from the Chinese version with little bearing on Australian players. Either that, or it’s just a major oversight, hard to say which is more likely.

Pokies

As soon as you glance at PlayAUD’s collection of pokies, you’ll notice one glaring problem: you can’t filter them out in any way. You can’t search for them. You can’t sort them by provider (let alone by feature or theme). You can’t even organize them alphabetically. This, in turn, can create all sorts of problems – for example, one of the bonuses here gives you free spins on a pokie it calls “Mario” that is completely impossible to find. That wouldn’t have been the case with even a simple search engine.

Either way, it doesn’t matter because most of those games are fake and come not from their original companies, but from bootleg ones that create false copies of them. Some people may not care about playing fakes as long as they still look and feel nearly identical (which many of them do), but keep in mind that with fake games, it’s the casino that gets to adjust the winnings percentage. And they could literally set it to 0% or 0.1%, something that wouldn’t be possible with official games where that percentage is independently controlled by the pokie provider specifically to dodge any conflict of interest with the casino.

Live casino

If that’s somehow possible, the live casino section of PlayAUD Casino is even more disappointing than its pokies. Granted, there are a few bigger providers here, like Pragmatic Play and Asia Gaming, but the vast majority of them come from China and wouldn’t be particularly well-known to an Australian audience.

Even the aforementioned Pragmatic Play, typically one of the best live providers out there, is so cut down here that most of its rooms, especially its more unusual titles (like its live game shows), are simply not available here. In general, if you’re not planning to play live blackjack or live roulette, you might as well forget about it altogether.

Deposits & Withdrawals

Every online casino needs a wide diversity of payment methods available in order to allow players to make a deposit so they can play its games and claim its bonuses in the first place. As such, casinos without that diversity place themselves at a hefty disadvantage. Unfortunately, this is precisely the case with PlayAUD Casino.

There are only two ways you can deposit here: PayID and crypto. Using your card, any e-wallets, or pre-paid solutions is not permitted by the site. Granted, PayID is very popular in Australia, so we doubt that most people who have bank accounts will be significantly inconvenienced by this. And yet, it’s an inconvenience nonetheless, and one that will undoubtedly turn people off – especially when they learn you need to have at least AU$50 in your winnings account to start a withdrawal!

Withdrawal time

Just like with the deposit options, you will have two different ways of withdrawing from PlayAUD – bank transfer (via PayID) or crypto. And while both of these methods will take a few days to be processed by the casino before the money is dispatched to you, how long it’ll take for them to reach you afterward will differ significantly.

If you use a crypto coin like Bitcoin, then you’ll receive your winnings almost instantly. Crypto transactions depend solely on the speed of the blockchain, and even among the slowest cryptos that rarely takes more than a few minutes. On the other hands, withdrawing via PayID may take up to a few days in addition to the few days it will already take for PayAUD to dispatch the money in the first place

Keep in mind that these estimates are purely theoretical, and we make no guarantees that any winnings will be dispatched by the casino at all.

VIP Program

Many online casinos will use a VIP program of some sort in order to reward their most loyal players, and while PlayAUD Casino doesn’t feel particularly rewarding, it does at least offer some sort of VIP features. Technically, it’s not a full program – you won’t be gaining any new levels or anything of the sort, so adjust expectations accordingly.

Instead, the program comes in the form of VIP bonuses. If you deposit a certain amount in one week (across all of your deposits for the week, doesn’t need to be all at once) you’ll gain a special VIP bonus. The more you deposit, the bigger the bonus. Sounds pretty cool, until you realize just how hilariously low most of these bonuses actually are.

We’re talking about depositing AU$1,000 to get a bonus of AU$58, AU$1,500 for an AU$88 bonus, and AU$2,000 for an AU$108 bonus. It’s borderline insulting, honestly. Who would bother depositing so much money if the reward for doing so is so low?!

Tournaments

Even if it’s terrible, at least PlayAUD Casino still has some sort of VIP program. The same, sadly, can’t be said for its tournaments, which are missing in action. If you’re the type of pokie player who enjoys competing with other players and getting additional rewards from it, well, you’re going to remain profoundly disappointed here.

On one hand, PlayAUD Casino has plenty of games, which makes the lack of tournaments rather perplexing. On the other, though, it is very likely that most of those games are fake – which, in turn, means that holding tournaments is going to be much harder. PlayAUD Casino probably doesn’t have a system to logistically keep track of tournaments (something that comes built into most modern pokies by the providers), so they can’t host one even if they wanted to!

Verification

Online casino verifications have been a part of the online casino industry for many years now, and while there are many who protest against them, at the end of the day their purpose is to keep players just like you safe. Imagine if you ended up losing your money because the casino shut down due to being (accidentally) associated with money laundering, as it didn’t do its due diligence in checking who it dispenses money to!

Unfortunately, this nightmare scenario is very likely here at PlayAUD Casino, since the site doesn’t appear to verify players at all. No matter how hard we looked, there’s no mention of a verification procedure anywhere, and while some players may rejoice at this, we assure you that it’s overall bad news for everyone involved. It’s just one more reason why we don’t think PlayAUD Casino is a legitimate one.

Is PlayAUD Casino Legit & safe?

Some online casinos sport a few red flags that serve as an indication that they might be fake. Others are so adorned with red flags all over that you may as well mistake them for the rebirth of the Soviet Union. It would be easier if we were to list the aspects of the site that didn’t make us utterly convinced that this wasn’t just a Chinese scam designed to prey upon Australians.

Most of the games here are very likely fake. The customer support is non-responsive. The bonuses are vague and poorly defined. There is no verification procedure listed anywhere. And the worst part is that the casino is unlicensed and has an unknown owner – meaning that not only is it illegal, but its parent company are fully aware of that and don’t want to put their name anywhere near it.

At the end of the day, it is vitally important to be careful when it comes to any and all online casinos. Depositing at any that even just MIGHT be unsafe puts in danger not just your deposit, but your payment methods and even your identity details. And PlayAUD isn’t just a casino that “might” be unsafe – it certainly is.

Customer support

At this point, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that PlayAUD Casino doesn’t have any form of customer support. If anything goes wrong (like your withdrawal request getting denied for no reason, or your deposit not reflecting, or anything else going seriously wrong), you won’t have anyone to turn to. No e-mail address is listed anywhere on the site, and while PlayAUD Casino does have a Telegram page, it’s just for updates and will not actually let you speak to anyone.

“Oh, CasinoAustraliaOnline, you’re so silly! There’s a live chat function right there,” you may be saying out loud with a roll of your eyes. We saw that too, of course – but it won’t connect you to any actual person. Instead, all it’ll do is hook you up to a bot that will repeatedly ask for your personal details, like PAYID. Even when you think you’ve broken through and have connected to an actual person, the conversation will almost instantly devolve into them spamming a message demanding your personal information. And we don’t need to tell you that it’s a terrible idea to give that out to any entity you don’t fully trust.

Mobile casino

Interestingly enough, the mobile section is the one part of PlayAUD Casino that isn’t either a scam or just a complete failure. Granted, it’s still not very good – there are fundamental problems with both the casino’s design and its execution on a technical level, and those issues aren’t fixed by shrinking the interface to fit a much smaller screen. But they are mitigated, somewhat.

The menus are much less chaotic, and the button layout starts to show some semblance of intuitivity instead of being an incoherent mess. There is even a mobile app that you can download and install on Android devices (and doing so will reward you with a small bonus), but honestly, we didn’t test that out and can’t comment on its quality, or lack thereof. Allow this to be your friendly reminder that you should never install apps on your phone or PC that you don’t 100% trust – and we don’t trust PlayAUD Casino as far as we can throw it.