Free lottery websites have become a popular alternative to spending your money on trying to beat the ridiculous odds of international lotteries. Thankfully, their popularity has meant that websites offering free lotteries are abundant online. In this Gembly.com review, we will look at one such website—though the way it functions is quite a bit different from what you might think.
How Does Gembly.com Work?
Gembly.com is a unique site when it comes to how it runs its operations—there is no denying that. To begin, you will need to register a player account with the site. This can quickly be done by providing a surprisingly small amount of information. You will be asked for your email address (cue the spam filters), your age, your location, and what user name you would like to use on the site. Once you have entered all those details, you will need to activate your free account using a link provided in your welcome email.
After you have activated your account, you will be able to begin playing on the site. The site has a variety of puzzle and card games for you to choose from. We should add here that it is necessary to play these games in order to enter any of the lottery-type draws that the site holds.
Each game on the site has a specific cost that is associated with playing it. However, the currency used to access these games is Gembly’s own gem currency. Games range from 80 gems to 150 gems per play—depending on the configuration you have selected for the game (e.g. tournament, standard play). After playing any game, you will be awarded a ticket for playing. These tickets can be used to enter the draws on the site. However, before we get to that, let us explain the gems some more.
The gems that you have are stored in your online player wallet. You will automatically receive 1,000 gems when signing up on the site. Additional gems can be won by playing games, claiming the free 150 gems for logging onto the site (available every eight hours), or by purchasing gems using your own money (so much for free, right?). Running out of gems will mean that you cannot make use of any of the games on the site—meaning that you will not be able to earn any tickets or enter any draws.
Once you have spent a few of your gems on playing some games, you will have accumulated some tickets to play with. These tickets can be used to enter a variety of draws that can be found on the Prizes page of the site. While the site says that they have a variety of fantastic prizes, the only draws we saw available (including when looking at previous draw prizes) are stacks of gems that you can use on the site. This is somewhat redundant as, aside from being able to play a few games, you don’t actually stand a chance of winning anything.
Regardless, if you would like to enter your tickets into a draw, simply select the draw you would like to play in and choose how many tickets you would like entered. The draw information will include the date that the draw will be ending on. After you have entered, your job is done, and you can sit back and wait to see if you are a winner.
Is Gembly.com Legit or a Scam?
There are quite a few free online lottery websites that do an excellent job of offering great prizes and an incredible user experience. Sadly, we are not sure that Gembly.com is one of them. Aside from the fact that the site does not even have an SSL certificate (something that every self-respecting website should have in 2020), it is also not possible to view the terms and conditions on the site. Each time that we tried to access them (even when using multiple VPNs) we were told that we do not have access to view them—even though they should be visible to anyone visiting the site.
It is not just these things, however. It is also the fact that the site does not really have any actual prizes available. The only prizes that we could see, as we mentioned above, are additional gems to spend on the site. So, for the first time in a long time, we are beginning to think that this site is more of a scam than anything that will legitimately help you win some great prizes.
User Experience
Considering how disappointing the site is so far, we have to admit that the user experience when visiting the site is pretty decent. The site looks modern and functions rather well. The only thing that we have a slight concern over is the fact that all the games on the website run using Flash Player (which will be reaching its end of life at the end of 2020). Once this happens, we hope that the site will adapt to a newer and more stable system.
Aside from this, the site works well on mobile devices (which it has to do due to the lack of a dedicated mobile app) and is available in three languages aside from English (German, French, and Dutch).
Lotteries Available
As you may have already deduced, you will not be able to access any of your favourite international lotteries on this site. In fact, aside from Gembly’s own draws (which we are already very sceptical of), there are no other draws or lotteries available.
Gembly.com Extras
There are no extras available on the site. The only thing that may interest you is that you will be able to remove all ads from the site if you choose to add gems to your account by purchasing them and not just claiming the free gems available throughout the day. To us, this is rather pointless considering in the ten or more games that we played on we did not encounter a single ad.
Payment/Withdrawal Options
Payments used to purchase gems can be done using the following payment methods:
PayPal
Visa
MasterCard
iDeal
Sofort
Bancontact Mister Cash
PaySafeCard
Via your mobile phone (exclusive to Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands)
How to Claim Your Winnings
According to the site’s FAQ (considering we were unable to consult the terms and conditions), you will not need to worry about claiming your winnings. All winners will be notified of their winnings via email once the draw has concluded. You will be asked to provide an address that you would like your prize delivered to. Gembly.com will then ship your prize to you. It is important to note, however, that prizes are only shipped to winners staying in the US, Canada, France, the UK, the Netherlands, Germany, Poland, and Belgium. Winners from any other territory will not receive their prize (and will usually be prevented from entering the draws in the first place).
Customer Support
Aside from an incredibly basic FAQ section that only works to answer the most basic of questions, the site can be contacted using an online contact form. They are also available on Facebook (@GemblyGames) and Twitter (@GemblyGames). Their Facebook was last updated in 2019, and their Twitter was last updated in 2014. This leads us to believe that the owners of the site are not too concerned about ensuring that new people register.
Welcome Bonuses/Promotions
Aside from the 1,000 gems that you receive when registering, there were no visible welcome bonuses or promotions on the site.
Rules and Regulations
While we did see that you need to be a minimum of 18 years of age in order to register a player account, we could not see any other rules attached to using the site. These are generally stated in the terms and conditions, and because we could not see these, it is a distinct possibility that there are other rules that we are unaware of.
Gembly.com Review Conclusion
Gembly.com has an interesting concept when it comes to how to run a free lottery website. In fact, we were quite excited when we first stumbled upon it. However, thus concept does not seem to have transitioned well to the way that it has actually been executed. So, while we do think that this site has massive potential, we would recommend visiting one of the many other free lottery websites available rather than wasting your time on a site where you may never actually receive any real prizes. After all, what’s the point?
