Smokos Casino › KYC and verification policy
KYC and verification policy
Know Your Customer is the check that confirms you are a real adult playing with your own money. It is a condition of our licence and of the anti-money-laundering rules that apply to us. It happens once, and doing it early is the single best thing you can do for your own withdrawal times.
1. When verification is required
- Always before your first withdrawal is released.
- When cumulative deposits pass the threshold set by our licence.
- When you change the payment method a payout goes to.
- Where an account has been flagged by monitoring, or where the details given look inconsistent.
- Where there is any doubt about age. Age verification always takes priority over everything else.
2. What to send
Proof of identity
A current passport, driver licence or national identity card. All four corners visible, nothing cropped, no glare over the photo or the machine-readable strip, and the document must still be in date.
Proof of address
A utility bill, council rates notice, bank statement or government letter issued in the last three months, showing your name and the address on your account. Mobile phone bills and anything printed from an online account without the provider's letterhead are not accepted.
Proof of payment method
- Card: a photo with your name, the expiry, and only the opening six and closing four digits legible. Mask everything between them, and mask the three-digit code on the reverse.
- E-wallet: a capture of the account overview with your own name visible next to the wallet address or the email the wallet is registered under.
- Bank transfer or PayID: a statement header showing your name, the institution and the account identifier.
3. How to send them
Upload from the verification section of your account. The connection is encrypted and the files go straight to the compliance team — support agents cannot open them. Do not send documents through live chat, social media or any third party, whoever asks.
Photographs taken with a phone are fine as long as the whole document is in frame and the text is readable. Scans are fine too. Files that have been edited, retouched or had fields blanked out beyond what is described above are rejected.
4. How long it takes
Most submissions are reviewed within a few hours and almost all within one business day. Requests for source of funds take longer because the documents need more work to assess. You will get an email either way, and the status is shown in your account.
5. If something is rejected
You get told which document failed and what was wrong with it, so the replacement is not a guess. Most rejections come down to one of five things: an identity document past its expiry, a bill that has aged out of the three-month window, a name spelled differently from the account, a corner missing from the photo, or glare sitting across the line that matters.
Where verification cannot be completed at all, the account is restricted and then closed. Deposits are returned to their source unless a legal obligation prevents it. Where the failure is because the customer is under 18, all stakes are void and only the deposited amount is returned.
6. Your documents afterwards
Verification documents are stored encrypted, accessible only to the compliance team, and retained for the period our obligations require after the account closes, normally five years. They are never used for marketing and never passed to a third party except an identity verification provider under contract or a lawful request. Your rights over that data are set out in the privacy policy.
7. When we ask for more than the basics
Most accounts never see this. Enhanced checks apply where the risk rating calls for them: a politically exposed person, a connection to a jurisdiction on a watch list, funding that is hard to trace, or turnover that does not match what we know about the account.
In those cases we ask for evidence of where the money came from and, occasionally, how the wealth behind it was built. Payslips, a bank statement covering the deposits in question, a tax assessment, a contract of sale, a grant of probate. The account keeps working while this is looked at unless the risk says otherwise, and you are told which it is.
8. Re-checking an account that is already verified
Verification is not permanent. We come back to it when an identity document expires, when you change the address or the name on the account, when a new payment method is added, or on a fixed cycle for higher-risk accounts.
A refresh is usually one document rather than the whole set, and we say which one and why. Nothing is held up while you send it unless the reason for asking was itself a restriction.
9. Getting it right the first time
- Lay the document flat and shoot from directly above; an angle bends the machine-readable line and the check fails.
- Daylight beats a lamp. A lamp puts a bright patch across exactly the part that matters.
- Include all four corners, with a little background visible around them.
- Send the original file from the camera. Messaging apps compress images until the small print stops resolving.
- Check the name matches the account exactly, middle names included. A shortened first name is the single most common rejection.
- For proof of address, use the version with the provider’s letterhead, not a screen capture of an online account.
10. If you cannot produce a standard document
Not everyone holds a passport or a driver licence, and not every bill arrives with a name on it. Tell support what you do have and the compliance team will say what it can work with: a Medicare card with a secondary document, a government letter, a statutory declaration, a bank letter confirming the address.
The obligation is to be satisfied about who you are, not to insist on one particular piece of paper. If an alternative gets us there, it is accepted.
11. What happens to the money if verification fails
Where identity cannot be confirmed, the account is closed and the deposited amount is returned to the instrument it came from, unless a legal obligation prevents that. Winnings from an unverified account are not paid, because we cannot establish who would be receiving them.
Where the reason for the failure is that the customer is under 18, every stake is void, the deposit alone is returned, and the account cannot be reopened. That rule has no exceptions and no discretion attached to it.