A sweepstakes gaming site with a troubled history is shutting down.
(And this is all happening shortly after the company began publishing its new crypto memecoin on social media.)
SweepSlots, in an email to customers sent in early June, announced it will shut down on Friday, June 20.
“After many wonderful years of bringing entertainment and excitement to millions of players,” the email read, “we’ve made the difficult decision to wind down operations at SweepSlots.com.”
Ironically, SweepSlots still hasn’t removed a popup message on its site that lists the states where it’s not available and that “we’re working on expanding availability — stay tuned for updates.”
Well … now that availability is: nowhere.
Players claim they aren’t getting their redemptions
Owned by Regal Technologies, SweepSlots launched back in 2021 and was plagued with issues in recent years.
Currently, players are posting on Reddit that they are allegedly not able to redeem the Sweeps Coins left in their account despite the shutdown announcement email saying “all pending redemptions will be honored.”
“They are a bunch of lying scumbag[s]!” one user posted in the r/ChumbaCasino subreddit. “They’ve owed me 500 since 2/12/2025.”
“They owe me 900 from November,” another user claimed. “I reach out every few weeks and get the same round as I did back then [that due] to an upgrade in [their] system there is a back log and blah blah blah then in April the money was back on the site so I had to re-redeem it and […] still nothing. I can’t even get a response from them now.”
One user even suggested disgruntled players speak to a lawyer about a class action lawsuit.
“I got one 500 payout a couple of weeks ago. I’ve been waiting on a 2000 dollar payout for 10 business days now,” that user posted. “What am I to do with the other 38k I won? Can we get a lawyer to weigh in on this?”
Redemption issues aren’t a new problem for SweepSlots.
Players have previously complained about such issues on Reddit and other forums. Notably, SweepSlots also has a history of not paying its affiliate partners. In a Next.io story from August 2024, the outlet reported that SweepSlots owed various affiliate companies a combined $1 million in mandated payments.
Shutting down after a memecoin launch? Not a great look
And then … there’s the crypto stuff.
On June 4, roughly a week before it began notifying players it was shutting down, SweepSlots announced it was launching a memecoin called $SWEEPSLOTS on the crypto blockchain platform Solana. A memecoin is a type of cryptocurrency based on internet jokes or internet culture that are often short-lived and can deliver huge short-term returns but are also volatile and risky.
Not only that — but, in the announcement on X, SweepSlots said its memecoin was “backed by a real casino.” Is it referring to itself here? So it’s calling itself a “real casino” without any social or sweepstakes qualifications?
And … how can a real/social/sweepstakes/whatever casino back the memecoin if that (insert adjective here) casino is no longer active?
Combine the timing of the $SWEEPSLOTS launch, with the “backed by a real casino” language, and current players alleging their Sweeps Coins redemptions aren’t being processed, and you’re left with an, at best, questionable situation.
A link in SweepSlots’ memecoin announcement takes users directly to a website where they can buy $SWEEPSLOTS with a card or crypto currency.
A promo message at the top of the site says: “SweepSlots is taking gaming to the next level with its Official Meme Token, giving players and fans an exciting new way to engage, win, and unlock exclusive rewards!”
However, the rest of the page mostly focuses on what $SWEEPSLOTS is and how to buy it. It doesn’t make any further mention of “taking gaming to the next level” or what that means. The FAQ section does say $SWEEPSLOTS is an “official SweepSlots product” but, again, it doesn’t delve into what that exactly means.
Market over-saturation can lead to issues like this
There’s no denying this is not a good look for online sweepstakes casinos, especially as operators fight tooth and nail to show lawmakers they’re legitimate entertainment companies seeking to join a lawful, regulated marketplace. When a site, even a small one, and even one that’s been seen as a bad apple in the industry, suddenly shuts down after a crypto launch, with players complaining of not receiving redemptions, it will cause a stink.
Part of the problem of existing in an unregulated, gray market environment is there are really no limits on the amount of operators. There are hundreds of sweepstakes casinos out there. And new ones are cropping up just about every week. Because why the heck not? Nothing — in most states, at least — is stopping a company from offering an online sweeps gaming platform, so tons are giving it a shot to see if they can carve out some of the revenue for themselves.
But the problem with that ecosystem is you’re going to get bad actors, bad apples, bad seeds — whatever you want to call them. And these operators can ruin the party, so to speak, for the sites out there that do honestly try to model themselves after regulated real-money operators.
In other words: No matter how legitimately sweepstakes casinos may run their businesses, the fact that sweeps casinos currently exist that are doing things like what SweepSlots is doing right now puts a stain on the industry at large, forcing the good actors to work even harder to chip away in their fight to become regulated operators in the United States.
And recent decisions from Attorneys General in New York, Mississippi, and Louisiana — and the New York Legislature — are already making that a tougher fight than it already was.
