Editorial Policy
Below is the editorial rulebook Mystake operates against — applied uniformly to reviews, guides and comparison pages. The point of writing it down is so readers can hold the site to a fixed standard rather than to whatever happens to feel reasonable in the moment. Anything you'd want to know about who actually runs the operation sits on the About page, and the flagship operator write-up lives at the Mystake Casino homepage. Every procedure on this page — production, fact-checking, corrections, freshness — applies to every piece of content the site puts out, without exception.
1. Editorial independence
The money behind Mystake Casino comes from affiliate commissions paid when readers click through and choose to sign up at an operator. Every mechanical detail of that flow is laid out on the Affiliate Disclosure page. On the editorial side, one rule covers it: a commercial partnership cannot push a score upward, and not having one cannot push a score downward. The same rating framework runs against every operator that gets a full Mystake write-up. Partner brands have been rated at six and below; operators with no commercial relationship have been rated at eight and above. Sales sits in one box, marketing sits in another, editorial sits in a third — and the editorial box is where the final published score is decided.
2. Sources we trust
Mystake content is assembled from four kinds of source, ranked by their weight.
- Hands-on testing. Reviews are built from real accounts opened on operator platforms, with real deposits and real withdrawal requests going through. That's the primary source for everything in a write-up except verifiable third-party facts.
- Regulator and government records. Licensing status, ownership filings, the UKGC register entries, GAMSTOP records together with any references back to the Gambling Act 2005. This material is the authoritative source for any legal claim made on Mystake.
- Independent player-community evidence. Long-term reputation tracked across AskGamblers, Casino Guru, Trustpilot, plus Reddit threads and dedicated player forums. This layer functions as a sanity check on our own testing results, never as a primary source standalone.
- Operator-supplied content. Press releases, marketing pages, partnership briefings the operator sends over. This material is read purely for context and never quoted as if it were independently verified. Where a number originates inside the operator itself, the review states that openly.
3. Fact-checking
Before anything goes live, every operator review runs a four-step fact-check. Stage one — pull up the regulator's public register and confirm the licensing claim actually checks out. Stage two — re-derive the bonus arithmetic from the published terms, then compare what falls out against the headline figure shown on the marketing page; if those numbers diverge, that's called out in the review. Stage three — the cashier is opened directly to verify advertised payment methods, withdrawal speeds and minimum deposits, because the cashier and the FAQ frequently say different things. Stage four — game catalogue claims get spot-checked against named studios and named titles, to make sure the marketing copy matches the lobby itself.
Numerical claims that move around — bonus terms, withdrawal limits, minimum deposits — are tagged in our internal tracking and re-verified on the schedule set out below. If a re-check reveals the number has shifted, the review is updated, the date at the top of the page is bumped, and a small dated note is added at the foot of the review describing what was changed.
4. Quotation, paraphrase and attribution
Verbatim quotation is reserved for material where the precise wording is the whole point — regulator notices, formal terms and conditions, court filings, that sort of thing. Everywhere else, paraphrase is the default, with the source identified in-line. Operator marketing copy gets rendered into our own voice; press releases are never re-run as Mystake content. Any third-party figure surfaced inside a piece — a Trustpilot score, an AskGamblers complaint tally — is paired with the source name and a live link to it.
Numbers cited around gambling harm, regulatory enforcement activity or the scale of the UK's online casino market are taken from government, academic or peer-reviewed sources rather than commercial outlets. Industry-association statistics make it into a piece only when independent corroboration is available alongside them.
5. Authorship and AI assistance
A named human writer or editorial-team member is behind every Mystake article. We do use AI tools for narrowly scoped tasks — drafting outlines, condensing long source documents, grammar passes, alternate headline brainstorming — but never for the analytical layer of a review. Scores, strengths-and-weaknesses summaries, comparative judgements: those are produced by people, not by models. AI is also never used to manufacture quotes or invent testing results. Where a factual claim has its origin in an AI tool, it gets verified against an independent source before publication, and that independent source is what we cite — not the model.
6. Corrections and updates
Corrections are handled across three tiers, depending on how serious the error is.
- Minor tier (typo, broken link, formatting glitch): fixed silently, generally inside one business day.
- Substantive tier (a fact, figure or claim that materially affects how a reader would decide): fixed inside five business days, with a dated note appended at the foot of the page detailing what was changed and the reason for it. The original wording is held in our internal version history but is not republished.
- Material tier (an error large enough to flip the overall verdict, or a regulatory development touching multiple operators): fixed inside two business days, with a prominent banner sitting at the top of the affected page for at least 30 days, and a notice posted on a dedicated corrections log reachable from this page.
If you spot something that looks wrong on a Mystake page, the route to flag it is the Contact page. Every substantive complaint is logged against the review it concerns, irrespective of whether the correction ultimately goes through.
7. Freshness
Operator reviews go through a full revisit at minimum every twelve months. The key data points — bonus offers, withdrawal speeds, payment methods — get re-verified on a quarterly cycle, more often than the full review itself. Topic guides and methodological pages run on an annual review cycle. The "Last updated" stamp at the top of any page tracks the most recent factual review of the content, not just the latest cosmetic edit or typo fix.
8. Conflict of interest
Nobody on the Mystake editorial team owns equity in, draws consulting fees from, or has personal paid affiliate ties with any operator they themselves are reviewing. If a possible conflict surfaces during the assignment phase, the writer is moved off that brand and onto a different one, with the swap logged in our internal tracking system. The site-level partnerships catalogued on the Affiliate Disclosure page belong to the business operation, not to any individual writer, and they're managed in a separate workflow from editorial entirely.
9. Reader safety
The products covered by Mystake are adult products, and a handful of editorial commitments follow directly from that fact. To begin with: no Mystake page ever presents gambling as a path to income; the consistent frame is "paid entertainment with downside risk". Beyond that: every operator review and every comparative roundup links through to Responsible Gambling tools and the relevant UK helplines — not tucked away as a footnote, but kept visible on the page. And finally: no Mystake page directs its language, imagery or examples at minors, at people experiencing problem gambling, or at self-excluded players. Where an operator's marketing strays across any of those lines, the review calls it out openly and the score moves accordingly.
10. Complaints, escalation and right of reply
Where an operator disagrees with a Mystake rating, the route forward is to write to the editorial address with a specific factual claim alongside supporting evidence. There are three possible outcomes from that submission. Outcome one: the claim turns out to be correct — the review is amended, and a dated correction note is appended at the foot. Outcome two: the claim is partially correct — the verified portion is updated, with the rest of the claim left unchanged and the reasoning logged into our internal records. Outcome three: the claim turns out to be incorrect — the review stays as-is, and the operator receives our reasoning back in writing. What we do not do, under any circumstances, is enter into pre-publication score negotiation.
Anybody with a concern about how Mystake conducts itself editorially is welcome to escalate via the Contact page; we aim to respond to complaints about a specific review within five business days. Anything privacy-related — data we hold, how it's held, the bases we hold it on — falls under the Privacy Policy page, and the technical companion document covering cookies and storage is the Cookie Policy page.