Black points are what a case costs an operator once it is closed. They are the mechanism by which a player's experience becomes a number on a profile.
How they are earned
- An at-fault case: a withdrawal withheld without a valid term, winnings confiscated, a bonus voided on an undefined clause
- The amount in dispute, which weights the penalty — a $5,000 confiscation is not a $50 one
- An unanswered case. Silence past the Tribunal deadline is an adverse inference and is scored as one
Points expire after 24 months. An operator that fixes its conduct climbs back, on a published timetable.
Why they are scaled to size
Raw complaint counts punish the popular and reward the obscure. A casino with a hundred players has very few complaints, and it is not because it is good.
So we divide by a size band:
| Operator size | Divisor |
|---|---|
| Small | 50 |
| Medium | 150 |
| Large | 400 |
| Very large | 1,000 |
The penalty is 4.0 x min(1, black points ÷ divisor), capped at −4.0 of the ten points on the TrustAudit Index.
Do the arithmetic
30 black points over 24 months, at a small operator: 30 ÷ 50 = 0.6 → penalty −2.40 → TrustAudit 7.6 before anything else counts.
The same 30 black points at a very large operator: 30 ÷ 1,000 = 0.03 → penalty −0.12.
Same conduct, twenty times the penalty. That is deliberate. Thirty black points at a site with a hundred players is a pattern. At a site with a million, it is noise, and a scoring system that cannot tell the difference is a scoring system that hands the top of the table to whichever casino nobody has tried yet.
Casinos under common ownership pool their black points both ways, capped at ±1.5. Groups share a reputation because they share an owner.