Three Bingo Sites Changed Operator. Exclusions Didn’t Move

On 28 July three British bingo sites changed hands. Not the brands, which kept their names and their web addresses. The company holding the gambling licence underneath them. Panda Bingo, Chit Chat Bingo and UK-BINGO.NET moved from one licensed operator to another, a fourth brand closed instead of moving, and none of the sites announced any of it as a change of licence holder. That distinction sounds like paperwork. It decides who a self-exclusion actually binds, and anyone who set one at these sites before the move should know that it stayed behind with the old company rather than travelling with the logo.

How four bingo brands lost their supplier

The chain starts with a software company. In June, Pragmatic Play told a trade outlet it was leaving bingo to concentrate on slots and live casino, and would support partners through a transition to other platforms. No press release ever followed, and its bingo product page is still up. The decision left every operator running Pragmatic rooms hunting for a new supplier.

One was Grace Media, whose platform carried four bingo brands and could no longer offer bingo at all once its supplier walked. Three found a new home. BOGOF Bingo did not, and closed after seventeen years.

Most of the little coverage this has attracted says the brands “moved to Playtech”. That gets the mechanics wrong in a way that matters. Playtech supplies the bingo software. The company that now holds the licence, runs the cashier and writes the terms is ProgressPlay Limited, which has been running Playtech bingo since 2024. Software is what you play. The licence holder is who you play with.

What the public register shows

We read both entries on the Gambling Commission’s public register rather than taking anyone’s word for it, and the trail is unusually clean.

On Grace Media’s licence, account 57869, all four brand domains now sit marked Inactive. Nineteen domains remain live on that licence, three of them listed as active and sixteen as white label, and every one is a casino. The company has not left bingo as a matter of licensing; it still holds a remote bingo licence. It simply has no bingo left to run. On ProgressPlay’s licence, account 39335, the three surviving bingo brands appear with the status White Label. BOGOF Bingo’s domain appears on neither register.

The closed brand’s domain now serves a short notice. “BOGOF Bingo has closed,” it says, above the line “Play at these recommended bingo sites instead” and six cards. Three are the brands that migrated. The other three are Queen’s Bingo, Vampire Bingo and Wombat Bingo, which were already the new operator’s own. Every button reads JOIN.

The page’s footer says that “the sites recommended above are operated by ProgressPlay Limited, licensed and regulated in Great Britain by the Gambling Commission (account number 39335)”. Note what that sentence does and does not do. It identifies whose sites are being recommended. It does not identify who put the page up, and the domain itself now appears on no licensee’s register at all. What the page carries nothing of is the reader’s own account. Not a word on balances left behind, on how to get them back, or on what became of any exclusion or deposit limit set there.

One name on that list of six has been through all this before. Search the register for chitchatbingo.com and it comes back three times, under three different companies. Inactive on one licence, inactive on Grace Media’s, live as a white label on ProgressPlay’s. Alongside it on the oldest of the three sit Wink Bingo, Costa Bingo and 888 Ladies, all still active there. Same name over the door at Chit Chat throughout, and at least three different companies holding the contract with the people playing on it.

A self-exclusion is drawn around a licence, not a logo

Here is the part that has gone unwritten. Self-exclusion does not attach to a brand, a website or a bingo platform. It attaches to the company holding the operating licence, and this operator says so itself.

Its terms require a player to warrant, in two separate places, that they have “not previously self-excluded from another account of the Company Network”. Turn to the definitions and “Company Network” means the official list of sites regulated by the Gambling Commission that can be found at a specific address. That address is the public-register page for account 39335. The perimeter of the operator’s own self-exclusion promise is a licence number.

Account 57869 is not on that list. It never was.

The Commission’s rulebook is built the same way, though it is worth being straight about how. Social responsibility code 3.5.3 requires a licensee to have self-exclusion procedures and to take all reasonable steps to prevent a self-excluded person from gambling. It does not spell out in terms whether that reaches an agreement made with a different company, and the honest answer is that the code has never said so either way.

The structure of the rulebook points one way, though. The neighbouring ordinary code 3.5.4 tells licensees they should encourage a customer to consider extending their exclusion to other operators they use, which only makes sense if it does not already reach them. Code 3.5.5 then requires every licensee to take part in the national multi-operator scheme, and that provision would have little work to do if a single exclusion already bound the whole industry. The Commission counts self-exclusions separately for each operator, and it tells players directly that gambling businesses run their own arrangements and that you may wish to exclude from one business only. Read together, the effect is that an exclusion made with one company does not automatically bind another.

So a self-exclusion is a boundary drawn around a licence. On 28 July the licence under these three brands changed, and the boundary stayed where it was. Nobody cancelled anything and nobody did anything improper.

An exclusion set with the old operator is still live where it was made, and still covers that company’s remaining sites. Nothing about the move undid it. What it does not automatically do is reach the three brands that left, while the fourth brand’s domain now serves a page recommending all three under JOIN buttons.

One more thing is worth saying plainly, because it sounds like a criticism and is not. We could find no Commission rule requiring any of these sites to announce the change to their customers. There is one place it was obliged to show up, though. Every remote licensee must display, on each screen a customer can gamble from, a statement naming the company and its account number and linking to its register entry. So from 28 July the footers had to stop saying Grace Media and start saying ProgressPlay. The change was never hidden. It was published in the one line on a bingo site that nobody reads.

The money rules changed with the licence

Because we rebuilt all four review pages when the move happened, we hold the terms on both sides of it. Nearly every number in the cashier is different.

The fee is the row worth pausing on. One percent capped at £3 is twenty pence on a £20 cash-out, which sounds like nothing. What it means in practice is that there is no free way to take your own money out of these sites. The charge applies whichever route you pick, every single time. Listings elsewhere still print “no fees” against these brands, and that stopped being true in July.

One caution on payout speed. The cashier pages say withdrawals start from one business day, but the terms publish no timescale at all, promising only that funds move “as soon as possible”. Treat the faster clock as an expectation rather than a commitment.

If you left money behind

The closure notice says nothing about balances, and that silence has a price attached.

Idle accounts get charged across much of the UK market, something we have documented at other operators. This network runs the same clause. Twelve months without use and the account is classified as dormant, after which the operator says it will try to return the money and give thirty days’ notice before charging £5 a month. The clause then finishes with a sentence few players ever read: “The fee charge on Your Dormant account may bring your balance to zero.”

Worth knowing alongside it: customer funds here are held separately from company money but sit at what the Commission calls the not protected level of segregation, which the terms state plainly. In an insolvency they are not ring-fenced.

What nobody has established is what happened to balances left at BOGOF Bingo. No notice covers it, so we are not going to guess. If money of yours is sitting there, the old operator’s support desk is still running for its casino sites, and that is the place to ask. Two other brands that shut without warning earlier in the year left the same silence.

Three brands, one rulebook

Put the three welcome offers side by side and something obvious emerges. Panda Bingo pays £40 in bingo bonus on a £10 deposit at 4x wagering. Chit Chat Bingo matches 200% up to £40 at 10x. UK-BINGO.NET matches 100% up to £50, also at 10x.

Now read the small print under each. It is the same paragraph. The same clauses in the same order, down to the sentence about withdrawal requests voiding active and pending bonuses and the line excluding two payment methods. Two things vary across three supposedly separate bingo sites: the multiplier and the amount. The brand writes the number on the banner. The licence holder writes everything else, which is the whole reason it pays to check the footer rather than the logo.

Two sisters on one platform, and one asks two and a half times the playthrough of the other. Worth knowing too: the Grace-era offers all died on 28 July. The bonus codes, the slots bonus, the ticket bundles, all gone, and all still sitting on listings elsewhere that nobody has updated. If you have arrived holding one of those, the site owes you nothing on it.

Who is running these sites now

ProgressPlay Limited is a Malta company, registration C58305, holding account 39335 for Great Britain. It has run remote casino since 2014, but its remote bingo licence dates only from August 2024, making it a fairly recent arrival to the game these three brands are built on.

Its regulatory record belongs on the page too. In May 2025 the company paid £1,000,000 in lieu of a financial penalty after the Commission found anti-money-laundering failures under licence conditions 12.1.1 and 12.1.2, together with customer interaction failings under social responsibility code 3.4.3. A formal warning came with it and an independent audit was required within six months. The decision records cooperation and remediation.

Grace Media has its own mark, worth stating precisely rather than loosely. In June 2025 it paid £60,000 after the Commission found marketing material had reached self-excluded customers, contrary to paragraph 2 of the self-exclusion code, along with a direct-marketing consent breach. Both findings were about marketing. Neither was a failure to stop a self-excluded player gambling, and the Commission recorded that procedures were in place and the failure came from human error. That record belongs to a licence these brands have left. Neither company’s history transfers to the other.

Credit where it is due on the other side. The new operator’s terms require identity and age verification before a player can deposit, gamble or open a free-to-play game, which is precisely what the Commission asked the industry for on 12 August when it reminded remote licensees that a withdrawal request should never be the moment documents are first demanded. Verification here happens at the front door.

What happens next

This is an early departure from the shrinking bingo network, not an isolated one. Every group still running rooms there needs a new supplier before it goes dark, and the list is long: Jumpman’s estate, Broadway Gaming’s brands, bet365, ITV Win, LeoVegas, Mirror and Lottogo among them. Each move means another set of players finding out, or not finding out, that the company behind their bingo site has changed.

One has already followed, though in a gentler form. Bingo Britain said in August that it is heading for Playtech too. In its case the operator is not changing: Palatial Leisure holds its own licence and is swapping software supplier rather than landlord. That is the commoner shape of these moves and the one that leaves a player’s contract exactly where it was. The distinction is the whole point. A new games supplier changes what you play. A new licence holder changes who you are playing with, and only one of those two things touches the protections on your account.

The terms even anticipate it. The operator reserves the right to transfer or assign its rights and obligations to a third party, which is the clause that makes the next move possible. Our record of the network and where each site has gone is where we are tracking it.

What to do if this was your site

If you self-excluded at any of these four brands before the move, that agreement was made with the old operator. It still holds there, across the nineteen sites that company still runs, so nothing you did has been undone. What it does not automatically do is reach the three brands that have moved, because nothing in the rules carries an exclusion across to a different licensee on its own. If you want protection at those sites, set a fresh exclusion on them rather than relying on the old one.

The stronger step is GAMSTOP. Registering once covers the online operators licensed in Great Britain, because taking part in the national scheme carries the force of a licence condition and binds both of the companies in this story. A brand changing hands makes no difference to it. Two other kinds of block also survive an operator change, and both are worth knowing about. Bank gambling blocks work off the merchant category a payment carries rather than the name of the company receiving it, and many UK banks now offer one with a cooling-off period before it can be switched back off. Blocking software such as Gamban, BetBlocker or GamBlock works on websites and apps, so it never depended on who held the licence in the first place. Our guide to the tools that actually work explains how each of them is scoped.

If the change passed you by, the practical advice is smaller. Read the welcome terms as new ones rather than the ones you remember, expect a fee every time you take money out, and do not leave a balance sitting for a year.

None of this required an announcement. A licence changed hands quietly, and the protections people had set went on pointing at a company that no longer runs the site.