GPWA Times Magazine - Issue 36 - October 2016

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You’ve been involved in the iGaming
business since you were 26. How did
you first get into it? What did you do
before becoming an affiliate? I started
as an online blackjack player at the age
of 26. I used to be a “bonus hunter” — or
“bonus whore,” as we called it back then—
and I made a decent buck, too. In search of
good deals and new bonuses, I found LCB,
which had been founded just a fewmonths
before by Joshua Chan. I started sharingmy
experience and tips and got hired within
a couple of months. My first role was as a
forummoderator and a blogger. In the years
that followed, I became a business partner.
Before I started as an affiliate I was a law
student at Belgrade University. The plan
was to finish school and start working
for my dad as a lawyer. Luckily, that did
not happen.
You’ve been very active on the forums
lately, tracking down sites that use
hacked or pirated games. How do you
go about finding and recognizing these
sites? Over the course of nine-plus years,
we encountered many shady things done
by various casinos, but I have to say that
we never expected to find such rogue be-
havior and the extent of fraud done by
such a high-profile casino group.
It all started when we received a player
complaint about what they claimed was
a weird looking NetEnt game. We imme-
diately decided to verify their claims and
conducted an investigation and inspection
of the game’s source code. This is when
we found that the NetEnt games were not
hosted on the official NetEnt server, and
in addition we discovered discrepancies
in game designs, jackpots, etc.
On top of all this, we found they were
also hosting pirated Novomatic games
— once again, not being hosted on the
official servers. They had obvious visual
discrepancies with the original games,
and our contact at GreenTube confirmed
these games were not genuine.These days
we check most of the games manually,
especially if it is a new casino, and verify
whether they host legit games or not. It’s
time-consuming, and that’s why we had to
assign a person to do this as their primary
job. As a result, we found several casinos
using pirated games, and I am sure there
are more.
We interviewed Josh, who is also asso-
ciated with the LCB sites, back in 2012.
(You can read the interview at www.
). How have
things changed for the company and
the family of sites since that time? Yes,
indeed, many things have changed—and
for the better, I may add. We have grown as
a company, now employing more than 35
people full-time. We have twomain offices,
one in Sydneywhere Josh is based, and one
in Belgrade, Serbia, where I work in the
headquarters. We also have staff working
from the U.S., the U.K. and Romania.
We have kept working on improving our
existing network, and we are currently
in the late stages of releasing the new
and improved LCB. Plus, we focused
on expanding our network by acquiring
well-established affiliate sites.
Our biggest acquisition was two years ago,
when we bought and
for $2.35 million. Be-
fore that we got , and
our most recent acquisition was .
Tell us about your role within the LCB
team. How and when did you get in-
volved? This is actually a tough question.
I have been doing everything for LCB and
the network. I started as a forummoderator
and blogger, then I was a data entry and
research guy. I have done some SEO and
social marketing—prettymuch everything
but programming and Web design.
These days I mostly boss everyone around.
But all jokes aside, I’mmostly involved inday-
to-day operations, delegating work, brain-
storming ideas and making sure things are
running smoothly. I still do a lot of research
and always strive to improve our network.
LCB runs sites for casino, bingo, poker
and sportsbook. Which verticals bring in
the most traffic? is dedicated to
casinos only. It started as a bonus comparison
and casino directory. Several years ago we
created three sister sites dedicated to other
verticals: , LatestPok-
.
LCB is our biggest traffic driver and earner,
which make sense since it was our first
site and the one we focused on the most,
followed by LBB (bingo), which has grown
a lot since the start of the year.
Our recent acquisition, ,
is also a huge source of organic traffic. But
unlike LCB, it is more focused on blackjack
and other table games, related strategies and
the odds that come with them. So we get to
cover all these different aspects and verticals
of online gamblingwith ourwhole network.
Do you gamble online? What about in
brick-and-mortar casinos? As I’ve al-
readymentioned, I started as bonus hunter.
This affiliate went from bonus hunter
to blogger to business partner at a
fast-growing family of sites
GPWA AFFILIATE INTERVIEW SERIES
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