Complaints

Last updated: August 2, 2026

If you think I got something wrong, tell me. This page explains exactly what happens when you do.

Ganbate is run by one person. That has an obvious downside for complaints — the person who reviews your complaint is the same person who built the thing you are complaining about, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. So this page is written to be specific about the parts where my judgement is not what decides the outcome, because those are the parts you can actually check.

The most important of those is a disputed bet. A bet is decided by mathematics that both of us can run, not by my word. More on that below.

What counts as a complaint

A complaint is you telling me I got something wrong — a decision, a result, a charge, an account action, or how you were treated. That is different from a question or a bug report, though the line is blurry and I do not want you standing on it worrying about which one you have.

Send it either way. If it turns out to be a support question, I will answer it as one. Nothing is lost by calling it a complaint.

How to complain

Any of these three reaches me. There is one inbox behind all of them.

A note on the contact form: it asks you to pick a category — the list is General, Billing, Technical, Account, Feedback — and there is no "complaint" category in it today. Pick the closest one — Billing for anything about money or refunds, Account for account actions, Technical for bugs — and write "Complaint" in the subject. The category only helps me sort; it does not change how the message is handled. The message box holds 5,000 characters.

What to include

The more of this you give me, the more likely my first reply is an answer rather than a request for details.

• The email address on your account — especially if you are writing from a different one. Without it I cannot find you.
• What happened, what you expected, and what you want me to do about it. That last part matters more than people expect. "Refund the purchase" and "explain the result" lead to very different replies.
• If it is about a round: send me the row from /bets — your own bet history. Each row shows the game, the time, the stake, the payout and the nonce, and carries a one-click Verify link with the seeds that round was rolled from; pasting me that link is the single most useful thing you can do. (You need to be signed in to see it. If you cannot get into your account, skip it — the fallback below works.) Two kinds of round are not in that list yet: Crash, and poker hands. For a Crash round, send me the round ID from the game's own recent-rounds panel if you still have it. For everything else, tell me the game and roughly when it happened — date, time, your timezone, and the stake if you remember it. That is enough for me to find the exact round from my side.
• Anything you have already been told, if you are coming back on an earlier answer.

What happens next

Three steps. I will be straight with you about the timing, because a promise I cannot keep is worse than a slow answer.

1. It lands

Your message is stored the moment you send it, and it sits in my inbox as open until it is resolved. Nothing is auto-closed and nothing quietly expires.

Be aware: there is no automatic acknowledgement email. The contact form confirms on screen that your message was received, and that confirmation is real — but no robot will email you afterwards to say so. The first email you get from me will be an actual reply, written by a person. If you emailed rather than used the form, you get no receipt at all until I write back. I would rather tell you that than have you sit there wondering whether it arrived.

2. I review it

What that concretely means, depending on what you are complaining about:

• A round — I pull the bet from the database and recompute it. See the next section; it is the part of this page that matters most.
• A charge or a refund — I pull your coin ledger, which records every bet, win, purchase, bonus, free claim and adjustment with a timestamp and the balance after it, and I check the refund rule against it.
• An account action — I look at why it was taken and whether it was right.

3. I answer

In writing, with reasons, and I will tell you which rule the decision turned on and where to read it. If I got it wrong, I will say so and fix it. If I did not, I will show you why, and I will not hide behind "at our discretion" when I actually have a reason.

Timeframes — honestly

There is no support team, no ticket SLA, and no queue of agents. There is me. I read everything and I reply as soon as I can, but it may take a few days.

That sentence is the whole commitment, and it is deliberately the whole commitment. I am not going to publish a table of response times — a first-reply window that one person cannot guarantee is not a target, it is a promise I would break, and I would rather under-promise here than have you counting hours against a number I invented. So: no service hours, no ticket clock, no escalation timer. Just the sentence above, which I will keep.

If something is taking longer than it should, chase me. That is not rude and it does not annoy me — a solo inbox occasionally drops something, and a nudge is the fix.

One thing does jump the queue: if you think someone else has got into your account, say so in the first line and I will look at it before anything else.

If your complaint is about a bet outcome

This is the case the whole system was designed around, so it gets the longest answer.

Every round is provably fair. Before you play, the server publishes a SHA-256 hash of a secret server seed — a commitment it cannot change afterwards without the hash no longer matching. The outcome is then derived from that seed by a public, deterministic function: HMAC-SHA256(serverSeed, clientSeed:nonce:cursor). Which means:

I cannot change a result after seeing your bet, and I cannot reverse one afterwards either. The same property that stops me rigging a round against you also stops me un-rigging one in your favour.

So when you dispute a round, we are not arguing about whose account of events is more believable. We are running the same calculation and comparing the answers. The maths decides, not my word — and not yours.

How to check it yourself

You do not need me for this, and you do not need an account: the verifier at /verify is public and runs entirely in your browser. It can recompute every game on the site, poker included. Nothing is sent to my servers when you use it — which is the point, because a verifier that had to ask me whether I was honest would be worthless.

But a verifier can only recompute what you feed it, and that is where the real gaps are: for a poker hand, nothing stores the inputs after the hand ends. Read the limits below before you rely on this — they are the honest part of the section.

Step by step: Provably Fair sets out the algorithm and walks through a verification by hand. Your seeds, and the button that rotates them, are on the public /fairness page, and every settled instant bet is listed with its seeds and a one-click Verify link on /bets.

How I check it

From my side, every bet is permanently tied to the exact inputs that produced it. The bet record stores the game, the seed it was played under, the nonce, and the outcome that was recorded at the time. So I recompute the round from those inputs and compare the answer to what the game showed you.

Then there are only two possible endings:

• It matches. The round stands. A verified loss is a loss, and I will not reverse it — not because I am being hard about it, but because I have no mechanism to, and because a casino that quietly reversed results for whoever complained loudest would not be fair to anyone else.
• It does not match. Then something is broken, and it is my problem, not yours. I want to hear about that immediately, I will tell you what went wrong, and I will fix it. If a round ever fails verification, that is the most serious bug this site can have.

The ending those two do not cover: the round was fair and the price was wrong

Both endings above quietly assume the bet was priced correctly. Twice, it was not — and I am not going to let a page about complaints skip that, because it is the one case where "it verified" is a true sentence and still not an answer.

Provable fairness proves the roll. It does not prove the paytable. If a bet pays 12.00× when the honest price of that event is 16.83×, every round it produces still verifies perfectly: the shuffle was clean and the number you were paid was wrong. Verification was never testing that. Writing the odds page is what caught it, twice:

• Wheel, medium risk. The medium layout's multipliers summed to 980 instead of 990 — a 2% house edge, double the rest of the site, at every segment count.
• Baccarat's four pair side bets. Inherited from an eight-deck game and priced for Ganbate's single deck. Three ran at a 29–32% house edge against you. The fourth, perfect pair, ran the other way, against the house.

Both are fixed. Every wheel layout is now exactly a 1% edge, the four pair bets are repriced to ~1%, and the tests now pin both rather than accepting a range. The full account — including the erratum that was in my favour and the one that was in yours — stays published on Odds & House Edge, because an odds page that deletes its own errata is not one you should trust.

What this means if you are complaining about one of those bets: "the round verified" is not my answer to you. Say you played the wheel's medium risk or a baccarat pair bet before the correction, and I will look up exactly what you played and what it was priced at when you played it, and tell you. Anyone who bet into the wrong side of a mispriced table is credited the Coin difference — I compute it from your ledger and put it back. When I checked the ledger against both corrections, no bet had been placed on either table while it was mispriced, so nothing was actually owed; the commitment stands for any that surfaces. What I will not do is point at a verifier that was never checking the thing that went wrong.

If you did not copy your server seed down

Your server seed is only revealed when you rotate your seed pair, and the app shows it to you exactly once, at that moment. A lot of people close the page without copying it.

That is fine, and it costs you nothing. Rotation retires the old pair rather than deleting it, so from that moment every bet you made under it becomes verifiable on /bets: the row gets a one-click Verify link that carries the revealed server seed, the client seed, the committed hash and the nonce straight into the verifier. There is nothing to ask me for and nothing to write down in advance. Until you rotate, rounds played on your active pair show as sealed — with the commitment hash I am already bound to — because handing you that seed early would let you compute your own future rounds.

What I will not do is hand you a server seed that is still in use. If I gave you the seed for your current pair, you could compute your own future outcomes before betting, and the game would be broken for everyone. To verify rounds played under your active seed, rotate it first — that retires it and reveals it. This ordering is not a policy choice; every honest implementation of this scheme has it.

The limits of this — said plainly

A fairness page that only lists its strengths is marketing, so:

• Verification proves the round, not your balance. It tells you the dice roll was honest. It does not, by itself, prove I credited you correctly. If your complaint is "the result was right but my balance is wrong," that is a ledger question, not a fairness question — and the ledger is the artifact I will check.
• Verification proves the round, not the price. A clean roll paid at a wrong multiplier verifies perfectly. That is precisely how both errata above survived — see the section above, and Odds & House Edge for the numbers.
• Poker hands cannot be re-derived after the fact. The shuffle proof for a poker hand is shown at the table when the hand ends and is not stored afterwards. I keep the chip result for every hand, so I can tell you what moved and to whom — but neither of us can recompute the shuffle for a hand you have already left. I would rather admit that than let you believe a check exists that does not. It is on my list to fix.
• Two games are not in your bet history, and one of them never can be. /bets now carries fourteen of the sixteen: the instant bets — Dice, Limbo, Wheel, RPS, War, Keno, Plinko, Baccarat — and the multi-step rounds — Mines, Tower, Chicken, HiLo, Blackjack, Video Poker — once those have settled, each with its seed pair, its nonce, and a one-click Verify link. The multi-step rounds really were missing for a while, written to a separate table the history query did not read; that was a hole in a provably-fair promise rather than a design, and it is closed. A round you have left open is still withheld, on purpose: its state holds the board you have not played yet, and handing it to you mid-round would hand you the answer. What is genuinely absent is Crash and poker — neither is rolled from your personal seed pair, so there is no nonce of yours to list. Crash reveals its own server seed on the game's recent-rounds panel once the round has busted, next to the hash it was committed to. Poker reveals its seed at the table and does not store it, which is the bullet above and the real remaining gap.
• You cannot bind your client seed to an existing commitment. Setting a client seed and generating the server seed happen in the same call, so the server sees your half of the input before it commits to its own. This is the one limitation that touches the strength of the proof itself rather than the convenience of using it, and it is the highest-priority item on the fairness fix list.
• No regulator certified any of this. Ganbate holds no gaming licence and has not been audited by a testing laboratory. It does not need one — no real-money wagering happens here — but it does mean the honesty of a round rests on the maths being checkable by you, not on a badge. That is exactly why the verifier is public and the algorithm is published.

If your complaint is about a refund

The rule is narrow, it is the same rule for everybody, and I apply it exactly as written:

A coin purchase is refundable only if requested within 14 days AND no wagers have been placed on the account since that purchase AND the purchased coins remain unspent. Otherwise final.

All three conditions, every time. Failing any one of them ends it — there is no partial refund and no pro-rata refund. I check the conditions against your coin ledger, which is timestamped, so this is a matter of record rather than a matter of opinion. If your request does not qualify, I will tell you which of the three conditions failed rather than sending you a form letter.

Two things catch people, so they are worth repeating here: "unspent" means unspent, not merely un-wagered — buying a cosmetic spends the coins and defeats the refund just as a bet does — and a single wager of any size, in any game, won or lost, makes that purchase final. The Virtual Currency & Purchase Terms set the rule out in full, with worked examples of each way it can fail.

If you are in the EU, the EEA or the UK, you also have a 14-day right to withdraw from a digital purchase. The rule above is written to sit inside that right rather than cut it down: inside 14 days, no bets since, coins unspent — email me and you get your money back, no reason required. That is §10 of the Purchase Terms.

There are exceptions that run in your favour, and I would rather you found them easily than missed them:

• If a purchase went through while you were self-excluded, you can have it back in full — regardless of the 14-day rule. Self-exclusion now closes the cashier as well as the tables: checkout refuses on the server, before any charge is created, so a self-excluded player cannot buy coins. One narrow window survives that, and I will not paper over it — if you start a checkout and then self-exclude before the payment finishes, the payment can still land. If that happens, tell me: you get the money back in full and the coins come off. I would rather return your money than keep it from someone who told me to stop.
• If a child bought coins on your card, write to me as the parent or guardian. I will not hold the 14-day window or the no-wagering condition against you.

Before you call your bank

Please talk to me first. Almost everything is fixable in one email, and this is the one area where going around me makes your situation strictly worse:

A chargeback terminates your account and forfeits your entire coin balance — including coins you bought, coins you won, and free coins — regardless of who wins the dispute. I will also dispute the claim, with the timestamped record of when the coins were delivered and every bet placed afterwards.

That is in the Virtual Currency & Purchase Terms (§11) and the Terms of Service (§11.2), and I do enforce it. It is not a threat and it is not there to trap you — it exists because reversing a payment for coins you have already received and played is not the same thing as an unauthorised charge, and the two get treated differently.

If you genuinely believe a charge was unauthorised — a card that is not yours, a purchase you did not make — that is exactly the complaint I want to receive, and I want it directly. Say so and I will investigate it properly.

If you are not satisfied with my answer

You should not have to just accept the first reply from the person who also built the thing you are complaining about. So:

Reply and say so, and tell me why. Say plainly that you want the decision looked at again. I will re-read the whole thread, not just your last message, and I will tell you either what changed my mind or why my answer is final. If it is final, I will say the word "final" rather than leaving you guessing.

I will not pretend there is a second tier. There is no complaints department behind me, no supervisor to put you through to, and no independent internal reviewer — inventing one would be a lie, and a page like this is worthless if it lies to you. What I can promise is that a second look is a genuine second look, and that "no" twice is a decision I have actually reconsidered rather than repeated.

Your rights are not affected by any of this

Nothing on this page takes away a legal right you have that cannot be waived by agreement. If consumer-protection law where you live gives you more than my process gives you, that law wins and you get the benefit of it. This complaints process is something I offer in addition to your rights, not instead of them, and using it does not use them up or start any clock running against you.

There is also no gambling regulator to escalate to — not because I am hiding from one, but because none has jurisdiction: Ganbate is not a gambling operator, holds no gaming licence, and no real-money wagering occurs here. I mention it so you do not waste time hunting for an ombudsman who does not exist. Your consumer rights, on the other hand, are entirely real, and the consumer-protection authority where you live is the right place for them.

Formal legal disputes are governed by the Terms of Service. What is settled there is the law and the place: California law governs, and the venue is Orange County, California (§17). Before you go near any of that, come to me — describe the problem, tell me what you want, and give me a real chance to fix it. I would much rather solve this in an email than in a proceeding, and almost every version of this ends there.

What a complaint does not change

Complaining does not unlock things that are locked by design, and I would rather say so here than raise your hopes in an email:

• A self-exclusion still runs its full term. There is no admin button to lift one early — I built it that way deliberately, because a safety tool you can talk your way out of in a weak moment is not a safety tool.
• Coins still have no cash value. They cannot be withdrawn, cashed out, redeemed, transferred, gifted, sold, or traded, and no complaint changes that. There is no mechanism anywhere in the system for it.
• A verified loss still stands.

The full list of what I can and cannot do is on the Support page.

What I keep, and for how long

I am not going to invent a record-retention policy to look professional, so here is the actual position.

Your complaint is stored in the support inbox, marked open until it is resolved. Your coin ledger, your bets, and the seeds you played under are kept for as long as your account exists — which is what lets me investigate a complaint about a round or a charge months after the fact.

If you delete your account, do not count on any of that still being reachable. Deletion runs on a 30-day grace period — inside those 30 days you can change your mind and the account comes back. After that the account is closed: you can no longer sign in, which means you can no longer pull up your own ledger, your bets or the seeds you played under, and the evidence you would want for a complaint is no longer yours to hand me.

What happens to the underlying records after that — what is erased, what the law makes me keep, and the parts of that erasure that are not currently working as they should — is set out plainly in the Privacy Policy (§9.3), including the manual route to get your data actually deleted. I am not going to compress it into a tidier sentence here than it deserves, and I am not going to tell you the records are gone when the honest answer is more complicated than that.

Either way the practical advice is the same: if you have an open complaint, or you think you might raise one, settle it before you close your account.

Who you are complaining to

Ganbate is operated by Abraham Ahn, a sole proprietor in California.

• Email: [email protected]
• Address: Abraham Ahn, 5013 S Louise Ave, Unit #972, Sioux Falls, SD 57108, USA

Related pages

• Support & Contact — how to reach me, and what I can and cannot help with
• Your bets — every settled instant bet, with its seeds, nonce and a one-click Verify link
• Provably Fair · Verify a bet — the algorithm, and how to check a round yourself. The verifier is public; no account needed
• Odds & House Edge — the exact edge of every game and every bet type
• How Coins work — the refund rule in full, with worked examples
• Terms of Service — chargebacks, governing law, and venue
• Responsible Play — loss limits and self-exclusion
• Community Guidelines — what is and is not allowed in chat. There is no in-app report button yet, so reports about another player come to me by email

Ganbate is a free-to-play social casino for adults 18+, operated by Abraham Ahn, sole proprietor, Abraham Ahn, 5013 S Louise Ave, Unit #972, Sioux Falls, SD 57108, USA. Coins have no cash value. They cannot be withdrawn, cashed out, redeemed, transferred between players, gifted, sold, or traded. There are no prizes of monetary value. No real-money gambling takes place on this site.