Terms & Conditions
These Terms & Conditions govern the relationship between our editorial team and every person who accesses Captain Cooks Casino, an independent gambling information and affiliate platform published for readers based in New Zealand. The document explains the conditions under which our casino reviews, bonus comparisons, slot breakdowns and payment method guides may be consulted, and clarifies the position we occupy as a publisher of commentary rather than as a licensed gambling operator.
Reading this agreement in full is worthwhile, since it describes both what you may reasonably expect from our publication and the boundaries of what any information resource is able to guarantee. Where the wording below refers to “we”, “us” or “our platform”, it means the editorial organisation responsible for maintaining Captain Cooks Casino and every page associated with it. The word “you” refers to any individual who browses, quotes, downloads or otherwise relies upon the material we make available.
How This Agreement Comes Into Force
Your access to any part of our platform constitutes acceptance of the provisions recorded here, together with any supplementary notices published alongside individual sections of the site. No signature, registration or written confirmation is required for these conditions to bind you; the act of loading a page, following an outbound recommendation or subscribing to our updates is sufficient to demonstrate that you have agreed to be bound by them.
Should any provision within this agreement be unacceptable to you, the appropriate course of action is to discontinue use of the platform immediately. We do not offer negotiated variations of these conditions for individual readers, and correspondence expressing disagreement with a particular clause does not suspend or modify its operation. The terms apply uniformly across desktop, mobile and tablet presentations of our content.
This agreement operates in conjunction with our other published policies, which together form the complete framework governing your use of the resource. Where a specialised policy addresses a subject in greater detail than the general wording used here, the more specific document will prevail in respect of that subject alone, without displacing the remainder of these conditions.
Reader Eligibility and the New Zealand Legal Setting
Our material is prepared exclusively for adults who have reached the age of eighteen years, which is the minimum age at which participation in gambling activity is lawful in New Zealand. Individuals below that threshold are not permitted to browse, register with, or act upon any recommendation appearing on our platform, and we take reasonable steps to ensure our promotional presentation is not directed toward minors.
New Zealand’s domestic framework, principally the Gambling Act 2003 administered through the Department of Internal Affairs, does not provide for the licensing of online casino operators inside the country. Residents nevertheless remain free to participate on gambling websites hosted offshore, and the legislation does not criminalise that participation. Readers wishing to consult the statutory wording directly may examine it through the official repository at New Zealand Legislation, which publishes the current consolidated text of all Acts in force.
Because our audience is geographically diverse in practice, you carry personal responsibility for confirming that gambling participation is lawful wherever you happen to be located when you act on our content. Before proceeding, please satisfy yourself of the following points:
- You have attained the legal age applicable in your jurisdiction of residence, and eighteen years at minimum.
- No court order, self-exclusion arrangement or personal undertaking prevents you from engaging in gambling activity.
- You are accessing our pages in your own capacity and not on behalf of a person who is excluded or under age.
- You understand that any account you open with a third-party operator is governed by that operator’s own conditions, not ours.
Where we become aware that a visitor does not meet these requirements, we reserve the right to restrict access to interactive features such as comment functionality, newsletter subscription or user-submitted ratings, without notice and without any obligation to explain the decision in detail.
The Editorial Character of Everything We Publish
Our platform functions as a media and comparison resource. We do not accept wagers, hold player funds, operate games of chance, process withdrawals, or administer bonus balances. Every article, ranking, table and tutorial we release is descriptive commentary about products supplied by third parties, and nothing within it should be interpreted as an offer to contract, a financial recommendation, or a professional opinion on the suitability of gambling for your circumstances.
The distinction between our publishing role and an operator’s commercial role matters considerably when questions of responsibility arise. The following summary sets out how the two are separated in practice:
| Area of Activity | Handled by Our Platform | Handled by the Gambling Operator |
|---|---|---|
| Reviews, rankings and comparisons | Yes — prepared by our editorial team | No |
| Account registration and identity verification | No | Yes — under the operator’s own procedures |
| Deposits, withdrawals and payment disputes | No | Yes — subject to the operator’s banking terms |
| Bonus eligibility, wagering conditions and forfeiture | Described only, for informational purposes | Determined and enforced by the operator |
| Game fairness, payout percentages and licensing status | Reported as available at the time of writing | Certified by the operator and its regulator |
Promotional details in the gambling sector change with considerable frequency. A welcome package documented accurately in one month may be withdrawn, restructured or restricted to different regions shortly afterwards. For that reason, the operator’s own published conditions always take precedence over our summary of them, and we encourage readers to verify current offer mechanics before committing any funds.
Commercial Arrangements Sitting Behind Our Recommendations
Maintaining a research-driven publication requires funding, and our chosen model is affiliate marketing. Numerous outbound links across the site are tracked, meaning that if you follow one and subsequently register or deposit with the destination brand, we may receive a commission or revenue share from that operator. This payment is made by the operator out of its own marketing budget and does not increase the cost of anything you do.
Commercial arrangements do not purchase favourable coverage. Our ranking methodology weighs licensing credentials, withdrawal reliability, game library depth, customer support responsiveness, bonus fairness and the transparency of terms. A brand that performs poorly against those measures will be described critically regardless of the commercial relationship, and brands with no relationship at all are covered where their inclusion serves the reader.
Readers should nonetheless keep the commercial context in mind and treat our conclusions as one input among several. Independent verification, comparison against other reputable sources, and careful reading of the operator’s own documentation remain sensible practices. This disclosure is made in the spirit of the Fair Trading Act 1986, which requires commercial communications to avoid conduct that is misleading or deceptive.
Rights Attaching to Our Written and Visual Material
All original content appearing on the platform — including editorial text, review methodology, comparison tables, ratings, graphics, page architecture, source code and the arrangement of information — is protected by copyright and remains our property or that of our licensors. Trade marks, logos and brand names belonging to gambling operators, software studios and payment providers are reproduced under fair dealing for the purpose of review and remain the property of their respective owners.
You are welcome to read, print and share our pages for personal, non-commercial purposes. What is not permitted is systematic reproduction: republishing articles in whole or substantial part, scraping our database of operator information, incorporating our rankings into a competing comparison service, or using our material to train commercial data products without a written licence from us.
Limited quotation for commentary, academic or journalistic purposes is acceptable where the extract is proportionate and accompanied by clear attribution together with a functioning link to the source page. Requests for broader syndication, translation rights or data licensing are considered individually and should be directed to our editorial team before any use occurs.
Behaviour That Will Result in Access Being Withdrawn
Use of our platform must remain lawful, respectful and technically non-disruptive. The following activities are expressly prohibited, and engaging in any of them entitles us to terminate your access, remove submitted material, and where circumstances warrant, refer the matter to the appropriate authorities:
- Deploying automated crawlers, scrapers or harvesting scripts against our pages outside the parameters set in our robots directives.
- Attempting to probe, breach or circumvent security controls, authentication layers or rate limiting mechanisms.
- Introducing malicious code, tracking scripts or any software intended to interfere with the operation of the site or the devices of other visitors.
- Submitting fraudulent reviews, coordinated ratings manipulation, defamatory statements or content that infringes the rights of a third party.
- Misrepresenting your age, identity or location in order to obtain access to restricted material.
- Using our brand assets to imply an endorsement, partnership or affiliation that has not been agreed in writing.
Enforcement decisions are taken at our discretion and we are not obliged to issue a warning beforehand. Where prohibited conduct causes us loss — through service disruption, remediation costs or reputational damage — we retain the right to pursue recovery through the ordinary civil courts of New Zealand.
Material Hosted Elsewhere and the Limits of Our Oversight
Our articles routinely reference external destinations, including gambling operators, software developers, payment processors, regulatory bodies and support organisations. Once you leave our pages, you enter an environment governed by somebody else’s terms, privacy practices and security arrangements, over which we exercise no editorial or technical control whatsoever.
We conduct reasonable checks before linking to a commercial destination, looking at licensing status, complaint history and the clarity of published terms. Those checks reflect conditions at a particular moment and cannot account for subsequent changes in ownership, regulatory standing or operational quality. Consequently, the presence of a link should not be read as a continuing warranty about the destination’s conduct.
Oversight of gambling activity within New Zealand rests with the Department of Internal Affairs, the government agency responsible for administering gambling law and investigating breaches domestically. Readers with concerns about an offshore operator should note that domestic agencies have limited jurisdiction over foreign licensees, and that complaints usually need to be pursued through the regulator named in the operator’s own licensing footer.
Keeping Gambling Within Healthy Boundaries
Gambling is an entertainment expense, not an income strategy, and every game covered on our platform carries a mathematical advantage in favour of the house. We consider it part of our editorial duty to state this plainly rather than bury it in fine print, and to present bonus mechanics, wagering multipliers and volatility characteristics in terms that allow readers to assess genuine cost rather than headline value.
Practical safeguards tend to be more effective than good intentions. Habits worth adopting before you begin include:
- Fixing a monthly entertainment budget from discretionary income and never drawing on savings, credit or borrowed funds.
- Setting deposit, loss and session limits inside your account before playing rather than during a losing run.
- Treating losses as the cost of the entertainment and declining the impulse to recover them through larger stakes.
- Keeping gambling separate from periods of stress, grief, intoxication or financial pressure.
- Using cooling-off and self-exclusion facilities early, at the first sign that control is slipping.
New Zealanders who feel their gambling has become difficult to manage can reach confidential, free and around-the-clock assistance through the Gambling Helpline New Zealand, a national service offering telephone, text and web-chat support for both gamblers and the whānau affected by someone else’s gambling. Contacting a service of this kind is a practical step rather than an admission of failure.
Our platform provides general educational material only. We are not clinicians, counsellors or financial advisers, and nothing we publish substitutes for professional assessment where harm is present or developing. If you are supporting somebody in that position, encouraging them toward qualified help is considerably more useful than attempting to manage the situation informally.
Content Supplied As It Stands, Without Assurance
All material on the platform is provided on an “as is” and “as available” basis. While we invest substantial effort in research, verification and periodic review, we do not warrant that every statement is accurate, complete, current or free from error at the moment you read it. Bonus percentages, payout figures, game availability, licensing details and payment options in this sector change frequently and sometimes without public announcement.
We likewise give no assurance that access to the platform will be uninterrupted, that defects will be corrected within any particular timeframe, or that our pages and any files transmitted from them will be free of harmful components. Hosting infrastructure, content delivery networks and third-party scripts all introduce variables outside our direct control.
Nothing in this section is intended to exclude, restrict or modify any guarantee, right or remedy that cannot lawfully be excluded, including those arising under the Consumer Guarantees Act 1993 and the Fair Trading Act 1986 where they apply. Where such a guarantee applies and cannot be excluded, our liability is limited, to the extent the legislation permits, to supplying the relevant information again or meeting the reasonable cost of having it supplied again.
The Extent of Our Responsibility for Outcomes
Decisions about whether to gamble, with which operator, and for what stake belong entirely to you. We publish comparative information; we do not supervise, approve or participate in the transactions that follow. Accordingly, and to the fullest extent permitted by New Zealand law, we accept no liability for gambling losses, forfeited bonuses, declined withdrawals, closed accounts, or disputes with any operator you reach through our pages.
Our exclusion extends to indirect, incidental, consequential, special and punitive losses, including loss of profit, loss of opportunity, loss of data, reputational harm and business interruption, whether the claim is framed in contract, tort, equity, statute or otherwise, and whether or not the possibility of such loss was foreseeable at the time of publication.
Where liability cannot be excluded altogether as a matter of law, the aggregate amount recoverable from us in connection with the platform is limited to one hundred New Zealand dollars. This ceiling reflects the reality that our content is supplied to readers without charge and that we derive no consideration from you personally for the material you consume.
You agree to indemnify us against claims, proceedings, penalties and reasonable legal costs arising from your breach of this agreement, your infringement of a third party’s rights, or your use of our content in a manner these conditions do not permit.
Governing Legislation and How Disagreements Are Handled
This agreement is governed by and construed in accordance with the laws of New Zealand. The courts of New Zealand have jurisdiction over any dispute connected with the platform, and by continuing to use our pages you submit to that jurisdiction. If you access our content from another country, you do so on your own initiative and remain responsible for compliance with the laws applicable where you are.
Our strong preference is that concerns be raised with us directly before any formal step is taken. Most complaints — an outdated bonus figure, a factual error in a review, a broken outbound link, a request that user-submitted material be removed — are capable of quick resolution once brought to the attention of our editors, and we undertake to acknowledge properly particularised correspondence within a reasonable period.
Should informal discussion fail to produce a resolution, the parties may agree to mediation before commencing proceedings. Nothing in this section prevents either party from seeking urgent injunctive relief where it is genuinely required, nor does it restrict any statutory right you may hold to approach a relevant regulator or consumer body.
Personal Information and Privacy Obligations
We collect only limited personal information, typically through newsletter subscriptions, contact forms, comment submissions and standard analytics measurement. Our handling of that information is governed by the Privacy Act 2020 and the information privacy principles it establishes, which regulate the purposes for which data may be collected, how securely it must be stored, and the circumstances in which it may be disclosed.
Under that legislation you hold enforceable rights of access to, and correction of, the personal information we retain about you. Requests of that nature are actioned within the statutory timeframe, and where we are unable to comply in full, we will explain the basis for the decision and identify the avenue available to you for review.
A detailed account of the categories of data we gather, the cookies and measurement tools we deploy, our retention periods and our disclosure practices is set out in our Privacy Policy, which forms an integral part of these conditions. Where an operator reached through our platform collects information from you directly, that collection is governed by the operator’s own privacy documentation rather than ours.
Amendments, Versioning and Continued Access
Regulatory expectations, commercial arrangements and editorial practices evolve, and this document evolves with them. We may revise, supplement or restate any part of these conditions at our discretion, with the revised wording taking effect from the moment it is published on this page. Substantive changes will be signalled through an updated revision date at the point of publication.
Periodically reviewing this page is therefore sensible, particularly if you rely on our content regularly. Continued use of the platform after amendments have been posted signifies acceptance of the updated terms, and if a revision proves unacceptable to you, ceasing to use the resource remains the appropriate response.
Final Provisions and Bringing Matters to Our Attention
If any clause within this agreement is found by a competent court to be invalid, unlawful or unenforceable, that clause will be severed or read down to the minimum extent necessary, and the remaining provisions will continue in full effect. A failure or delay on our part in enforcing any right does not operate as a waiver of that right, nor does it prevent later enforcement of the same or any other provision.
These conditions, read together with our privacy documentation and any notices published on individual pages, constitute the entire understanding between you and us in relation to the platform, and supersede any prior representation or arrangement on the same subject matter. We may transfer our rights and obligations under this agreement in connection with a restructure or transfer of the publication, provided your position is not materially prejudiced.
Questions concerning the interpretation of any clause above, requests to exercise your privacy rights, notifications of factual inaccuracies in our reviews, and enquiries regarding content licensing or partnership arrangements should be addressed to our editorial team at [email protected]. Correspondence that identifies the specific page and the nature of the issue tends to be resolved considerably faster than general enquiries.
Readers who prefer a structured submission may instead use the form available on our contact page, which routes messages to the appropriate section of our team and allows us to acknowledge receipt promptly. Legal notices served in relation to this agreement should be sent to the same address and marked for the attention of our compliance function.