Apollo Casino Review: Scam or safe?

Apollo is a new crypto-focused online casino and sportsbook. Usually, that is pretty exciting, as new casinos tend to offer better services. That is not so much the case here at all! Instead, this online gambling house is pretty subpar, in every sense of the word. Starting off with its lackluster bonuses, through its limited amount of games to play, to the shallow sportsbook, this house has nothing to offer which can compete with other casinos.

There is also a pretty limited amount of payment methods available. And even though the casino has a lot of currencies and crypto tokens it accepts, it does not mention most of the deposit conditions for most of those.

So, overall, we cannot say that Apollo is a casino we can recommend at all. But if you are curious about what playing there can look like, check out the full review of the house we have prepared below. It will go over everything you need to know about it, starting off with the underwhelming promotions:

Bonuses

A full list of the promotions with Apollo is available below. As you will see, there are not many of them at all:

There is a bunch of Welcome bonuses, followed by a couple of Recurring promotions. Most of the details about these promotions are unknown. That is because Apollo does not list them at all! And from what we do know about some of the bonuses, they cannot be said to be that great. Just take a look:

• The Welcome Bonus Package covers the first four deposits you can make. It awards you with 50% of the first deposit, 100% of the second, 150% of the third and up to 200% of the fourth deposit you make. However, how much you need to cash in to claim either one of these promotions is up to anyone's guess. Usually, such Welcome bonuses have a minimum deposit requirement of 10-20 USDT. The maximum bonus amount is not mentioned either, and we don't believe the casino does not have such an upper limit on how much you can get! However, the wagering requirement is pretty low. From the Terms and Conditions of the bonus, we discovered that it was set to 22x. This means you need to play through the funds you receive from any of the promotions that many times to withdraw. Usually, these requirements are between 30x and 40x. As great as this is, we don't know if there are cash out limits, though, and it is possible that there are certain restrictions on how much you can win from the promotions.
• Secondly, Apollo features a very confusing promotion called its Referral Bonus. The way this bonus is calculated is not outlined in a way as to make it understandable by the average person. In fact, we believe that only whoever wrote down the conditions of the bonus knows what they mean. Still, we will do our best to try and summarize them. The casino counts the winloss of any account which you have referred throughout the month. What is the winloss? This is either a ratio between the wins and losses of the accounts, or the losses subtracted from the wins. It is not clear what the term means at all. Either way, this winloss has to reach -10 000 for the bonus to start getting added to your account. You might be wondering 10 000 of what currency unit needs to be reached, which Apollo does not make clear either. The bonus you receive is between 5% and 15%. The lower this winloss number is, the higher percentage of it you will get credited to your account. Once the money is received by you, there is no information about what you need to do in order to cash out. As in, the wagering requirements of the bonus are completely unknown. We consider this to be a very bad bonus overall.
• Thirdly, there is a Daily Cashback, which is tied to the VIP program of the casino. Players earn between 0.4% and 0.8% of their losses, based on the level of their account. We will explain the levelling system a bit further on. For now it suffices to say that the cashback does not have a maximum you can get. On the other hand, the money received from it can be subject to wagering requirements and cash out limits. Expecting to find any reliable information about the promotions of the casino really seems impossible.
• Fourthly, there is another opaque promotion, called the Referral Commission. Supposedly, once you introduce an account to the casino and the person holding the account deposits, 0.1% of their wagers will be credited to your account as a bonus. This seems pretty generous, considering the house mentions there is no upper limit to how much you can receive that way. On the other hand, the wagering requirement and cash out limit are not mentioned. So, withdrawing this commission can be difficult.
• Finally, the VIP benefits of the casino are a way for it to incentivize players to stick around and deposit more and more. There are five account tiers through which you can progress. These tiers all award you with the same perk – increasing the percentage of the Daily Cashback promotion. There really does not seem to be more to the VIP system which is really a shame. Considering other casinos have implemented really unique and fun rewards for climbing the ranks with them, Apollo is once again incredibly underwhelming. These rewards tend to be exclusive bonuses, higher wagering limits, exclusive faster withdrawal times and so on.

Overall, the promotions with Apollo are incredibly convoluted. At the same time, a straightforward recurring deposit bonus which just gives you a certain amount of money would be more rewarding. It would also provide players with a clearer goal to work towards. So, we hope Apollo introduces something like that.

We should also mention the Quests, which don't deserve a lot of attention because of how unrewarding they are with this casino. Once you make an account, you are treated with three of them, each awarding you with 0.1 USDT for completion. They are all tied to completing trivial tasks like changing your profile pic and verifying your email and phone number. We cannot say whether the money you earn that way is freely withdrawable either. Nor whether there will be more quests available once you are done with the initial couple of them. Overall, this is a very unrewarding set of boring tasks and we cannot say we like it.

License

The regulation over Apollo might be the best thing about the casino overall. While its other services are very subpar, the license it holds is legitimate. Here's what the casino has to say about its regulation:

It claims to be under the oversight of Gaming Curacao (GC), which is one of the four license issuers in Curacao, a small Carribean country. Regulating the egaming sector has been delegated to these license issuers. However, before we talk about what Apollo holding such a license means for the player, let's actually verify that it is regulated. Doing so is as easy as clicking on the GC logo in the screenshot above, which leads us to the following page:

This is an excerpt from the GC register. It entirely confirms what the casino claimed about its license! The majority of casinos these days have a similar license, too. What makes Curacao such a popular choice for operators of online houses is that it does not stifle them. At the same time, a license from the GC still means they have to comply with certain rules, and offer players certain protections. Here is what those are:

• Firstly, the casinos licensed with this body need to implement certain policies which are aimed at protecting the information they collect on players. This information is necessary in order to combat money laundering and financial crime. It includes details about you and your payments which could cause a lot of damage if they fell into the hands of hackers and other malicious third parties! So, it is necessary to prevent that from leaking. To do so, licensed houses encrypt every bit of data they receive from you. This is an often overlooked, and nonetheless incredibly important, policy of theirs!
• There is also a lot of attention which regulators pay to making sure that players are provided with responsible gambling options. These options include being able to set custom deposit limits. or even close down your account unilaterally. Aside from them, houses also offer you a wealth of useful information on what problem gambling can look like, and where you can go if you need to seek help. This is crucial in making sure online betting is safer and more fun for everyone!
• Thirdly, playing with licensed casinos is how you can know you have access to legitimate games only. These are titles, sourced from audited Suppliers. A Supplier being audited means that the random number generators it uses in its games have been checked by independent auditors. The generators determine the outcomes of every bet you place. So, by auditing them, it is possible to find out if there is anything off about how the games pay out. When you play with licensed casinos, the games you play are certifiably fair, because of that!

As you can see, the advantages to playing in licensed houses are quite a lot! So we are generally happy that Apollo is one of them too, despite the fact the rest of its services are pretty poor.

We have to give points to the house for something else, too. The list of languages it supports is pretty major, which means its website is actually quite accessible. Here is what all of them are:

Languages: Bengali, German, Spanish, French, Hindi, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Turkish, Vietnamese, Finnish, Chinese

And here is a list of the restricted countries, from which players will not be able to sign up to the casino:

Restricted countries: Afghanistan, American Samoa, Australia, Belarus, Belgium, Congo (Brazzaville), Cuba, Curaçao, Czech Republic, Côte d'Ivoire, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Iran, Iraq, Italy, Korea, North, Liberia, Libya, Lithuania, Netherlands, Portugal, Serbia, Slovakia, South Sudan, Spain, Sudan, Switzerland, Syria, United Kingdom, United States, United States Minor Outlying Islands, Virgin Islands, U.S., Zimbabwe

Deposit and Withdrawal

Cashin in and out of the casino is possible via a variety of cryptocurrencies and FIAT currencies. The list of accepted payment methods includes PIX for BRL deposits and bank transfers for the rest of the FIAT options. Note that while Apollo does list the INR as a possible means of deposit, attempting to use it to cash in leads to an error page, at least at the time of writing.

Let's take a look at what we know about the different means of payment and accepted currencies:

Currencies: Tether (USDT), Bitcoin (BTC), USD Coin (USDC), Shiba Inu (SHIB), Dogecoin (DOGE), Litecoin (LTC), Binance Coin (BNB), Japanese Yen (JPY), Brazilian Real (BRL), Indian Rupee (INR), South Korean Won (KRW)

The conditions around PIX deposits seem to be quite good, but that is not so much the case with the rest of the payment methods. Simply put, how much crypto you can cash in with the casino at the minimum and at the maximum is up to anyone's guess.

There is no mention of the house charging deposit fees, which is great. The majority of casinos nowadays do no such thing, but that does not mean you will not be expected to cover certain costs when depositing. In fact, you would normally need to cover the third party charges, by the payment providers and crypto miners who process your transactions. These fees are a normal part of cashing in to casinos, and it is usually the case that the player is expected to cover them.

What's actually problematic is how little information the casino has for withdrawals:

Please note that cashing out does require you to have cleared a certain wagering requirement. Said requirement is decently low, placed at 1x the deposited funds. It is necessary for players to deal with such requirements in order for casinos to combat money laundering.

Other than that, Apollo does not actually mention how much its minimum withdrawal requirements are. In general, they trend towards 10-20 USDT nowadays. Though, it is also common for crypto-focused casinos to have lower requirements.

There is no way to know how long Apollo takes to process requests to cash out either. Usually, houses are able to clear those within several hours of you submitting them, though they can also take up to three days and even longer. Hopefully that is not the case here, but we wish we didn't have to guess! Instead, the casino should have clearly indicated how long these processing times are.

Either way, at least there are no withdrawal fees. What we said about third party charges applies here, though. So make sure that you keep them in mind when cashing out. Furthermore, we should mention that the casino does not seem to charge the holders of inactive accounts with any penalty fees.

Games and Game Suppliers

There are a very underwhelming amount of Game Suppliers with the casino. We saw around 20 of those in total. However, most modern casinos are able to provide players with the games of upwards of 50 Suppliers. What Apollo has, in comparison, is pretty uncompetitive. Still, we saw some of the leading casino software developers listed among the providers the house works with. Take a look:

Game providers: Evolution, Booongo, CQ Gaming, PragmaticPlay, Authentic Gaming, Play'n GO, Evoplay, PGSoft, Other

This means that while the overall quantity of games is very low, there is actually a couple of fun options for you to explore:

• Slots: The Slots selection of Apollo includes a total of a bit over 1600 games. Among them are major titles like Gates of Olympus, Big Bass Bonanza, Sweet Bonanza, Book of Dead, Book of Rebirth, Wolf's Gold and Mustang Gold. However, the way in which the games are actually ordered makes browsing them very difficult and even somewhat annoying. There is no way to filter them by their themes, only by their developer. We would have liked a way to at least filter out certain mechanics. If you are looking for Bonus Buy slots, for instance, you will have to browse the entire catalog, instead of seeing what you wanted. In fact, this filtering is a really basic functionality of the website of any casino and it is perplexing that Apollo does not feature it.
• Table Games: On the other hand, the number of Table games is around 50-60 in total. There are only Live games too, and you can wager on live dealer versions of Baccarat, Poker, Blackjack, Roulettes and Craps. Needless to say, there is no way to filter the games, but with such a shallow amount, there is no need to either way. The lack of virtual dealer games and the general lack of games means Apollo's library is once again subpar!
• Game Shows: There are a couple of Game Shows within the Live gaming tab, too. These include Mega Wheel and Sweet Bonanza Candyland.
• Crash Games: Since Apollo is a crypto casino, it features a couple of instant win games playable with digital currencies. These are Mines, Dice, HiLo, Wheel and so on.

As for the Sportsbook with the casino, it turned out to be competent enough. There is live and prematch betting available. The events in the book are a decent number too, from Football and Cricket to Badmington and Esports. These sportsbook only accept USDT bets, though, which means you will need to exchange your funds to that if they are in another currency. Also, no special sportsbook features are offered by the casino, which makes the sportsbook fairly uncompetitive. No advanced payouts and acca boost bonuses are available!

Conclusion

Overall, we recommend staying away from this casino. Even though it is licensed, it cannot be said to provide a good service whatsoever. Check out one of the recommended casinos, or browse our website to find a better alternative to Apollo!