McLuck Restricted States: 2 Lists Disagree on California

McLuck, Hello Millions, PlayFame and SpinBlitz - four sweepstakes casinos run by one operator - serve a site notice that names 16 blocked states and leaves California off, seven months after running a sweepstakes casino there became a crime. Each of those same brands publishes a help-centre article that does block California, and the help centre is the list to believe.

We read both documents for all six brands in the B-Two Operations family on August 9, 2026. They contradict each other, and the state they contradict each other about is the one carrying a criminal statute.

Which list leaves California out, the site notice or the help centre?

The site notice is the one that leaves it out. Every B-Two site serves a "Restricted Access" notice to visitors outside its territory, and that notice names the states the brand says it does not cover. McLuck puts it this way: "McLuck is currently available only within Canada and United States, with the exception of the following states: Washington, Idaho, Indiana, Nevada, Kentucky, Montana, Michigan, Louisiana, Delaware, New York, New Jersey, West Virginia, Maryland, Connecticut, Tennessee, Maine."

Sixteen states. Hello Millions, PlayFame and SpinBlitz serve the same sixteen, word for word. California is on none of the four.

The help centres tell a different story. McLuck's lists seventeen states where the brand "is not available", California first among them, and says the games reach "33 US states and the District of Columbia". Hello Millions and SpinBlitz publish the same seventeen.

That fourth column is one event, not four. Zendesk records when an article's record was last touched and, separately, when its body was last edited, and for all four of the brands that omit California the body edit lands on July 13, 2026, inside ninety seconds:

1. SpinBlitz, 21:27:05 UTC
2. PlayFame, 21:27:41 UTC
3. McLuck, 21:28:05 UTC
4. Hello Millions, 21:28:34 UTC

Somebody refreshed four state lists in one sitting that evening and touched none of the four site notices.

Two brands in the family get it right. Mega Bonanza blocks California in both documents, and Jackpota's help centre does too; Jackpota served us its full homepage rather than a territory notice, so it has no second list to compare.

Is it illegal to run a sweepstakes casino in California?

Yes, and that is what sets California apart from the other fifteen: the answer sits in the Penal Code. Assembly Bill 831 was chaptered as Chapter 623, Statutes of 2025 on October 11, 2025, as a non-urgency measure, which put it in force on January 1, 2026. It added Section 337o: "It is unlawful for any person or entity to operate, conduct, or offer an online sweepstakes game in this state."

The statute does not stop at the operator. It reaches any "financial institution, payment processor, geolocation provider, gaming content supplier, platform provider, or media affiliate" that knowingly supports or promotes one. Penalties run from a $1,000 minimum to $25,000, up to a year in county jail, or both. That clause is why our California state page carries no offers and never will.

A document that omits California from a blocked list is not a clerical slip like omitting Vermont. It is the one line a California reader would act on.

Can a California player actually sign up?

We cannot tell you that, and we are not going to imply it. Our requests came from outside the United States, which is why we saw the territory notice at all, so we could not test whether the geolocation check at signup admits a California address. The likeliest explanation is the dullest one: a marketing interstitial that stopped being maintained while the help centre was refreshed without it. B-Two has published no explanation of the gap, and we did not put the question to the company before publishing. If it answers, this piece gets updated.

Does PlayFame still list Tennessee as available?

It does, and this one runs the other way. Its help centre names sixteen excluded states, one fewer than its sister brands, and the state it drops is Tennessee. The available list then says so directly: "Available in 34 US States and the District of Columbia: Alabama, Alaska, Arizona ... South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas..."

Tennessee has banned this model since spring. Public Chapter 1117, the enrolled text of SB 2136, makes it unlawful to operate, conduct or commercially promote "online sweepstakes games" and defines those as dual-currency games you can exchange for a prize or cash. Section 11 of the act reads: "This act takes effect upon becoming a law, the public welfare requiring it." Governor Bill Lee approved it in May 2026. Our Tennessee state page has the enforcement history that preceded it.

PlayFame's own site notice does block Tennessee. Its help centre invites Tennessee players in. Same brand, same day.

When does Oklahoma's ban reach these brands?

Not yet. All six help centres list Oklahoma as available, and today that is right: SB 1589 does not bite until November 1, 2026. Call it a countdown rather than a contradiction: twelve weeks out, no B-Two brand has published a wind-down date for Oklahoma players, and past state exits have given players windows as short as 14 days.

Which list should you trust, the site notice or the help centre?

Read the help centre, not the front door. That is the whole answer, and the way we verify operator paperwork is why we can say it. Across all six brands the help articles were internally consistent - excluded states plus available states summed to 50 every time - and each carries an edit timestamp we could check. The territory notices carry no date at all, and four of the five we could read are wrong about a state where the conduct is criminal. WOW Vegas shows what a maintained document looks like: its help centre splits the list into states barred from registration and states barred from Sweeps Coins play, California in the second group.

That advice cut at us, and harder than we would have liked. On publication our own excluded-state data disagreed with these help centres on every brand in the family. The McLuck and Hello Millions reviews both listed Alabama, Georgia and Ohio as excluded and both omitted California, Indiana, Maine and Tennessee; the operator disagreed on all seven. Our SpinBlitz review carried roughly 14 excluded states against the help centre's 17, and our Mega Bonanza review roughly 15 against 18. Our Jackpota review erred the other way, blocking 25 states including Arizona, Illinois, Iowa, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania and Virginia, every one of which Jackpota's help centre lists as available. Our PlayFame review reproduced that brand's site notice exactly, Tennessee included and California missing, which is the front door this article has just told you not to read. Even our WOW Vegas review, the brand we held up two paragraphs ago as the well-kept example, listed 12 excluded states and missed Illinois, Indiana and Maine from WOW Vegas's own Sweeps Coins list. Our B-Two operator profile repeated the stale number as well, saying McLuck and Hello Millions "each exclude 16 states". All seven have since been corrected against the operators' own help centres, PlayFame last, on August 11. We were not going to publish a piece about other people's unmaintained lists and quietly leave ours standing.

One more correction to our own file. We ran the same exercise on Spree's four disagreeing lists on August 6 and used PlayFame as the control, reporting that it "serves one list, 16 states" with no second version contradicting it. That was accurate about the two documents we read that day and wrong as a statement about the brand. PlayFame does serve a second list, in its help centre, also of 16 states, and it is not the same 16.

The state lists are not the only part of these help centres that has moved. Three days before we read them, on August 6, four of the six brands rewrote their account rules so that a second account voids your coin balance, and gave verification a 30-day deadline that none of them stated before.

If a state you play from appears on a list it was not on last month, treat that as a wind-down notice and move your balance. Our redemption walkthrough covers the order to do it in, and our ranked list of sweepstakes casinos and our record of which states are closed to sweeps play track exits as we confirm them.

Sources & documents

• McLuck site access notice - the territory notice served to out-of-area visitors, read August 9, 2026
• Hello Millions site access notice
• PlayFame site access notice
• SpinBlitz site access notice
• Mega Bonanza site access notice
• Jackpota homepage - served in full, with no territory notice
• McLuck help centre, "Can I play from anywhere?" - Zendesk API record, body last edited July 13, 2026, record last updated July 29, 2026
• Hello Millions help centre article index
• PlayFame help centre article index
• SpinBlitz help centre article index
• Mega Bonanza help centre article index
• Jackpota help centre article index
• California AB 831, bill text, Penal Code Section 337o
• California AB 831, bill status: Chapter 623, Statutes of 2025, chaptered October 11, 2025, non-urgency
• Tennessee Public Chapter 1117 (SB 2136), enrolled act
• WOW Vegas help centre, which states and territories are excluded
• High 5 Casino Terms of Use, section 3.1.4
• Fortune Wins Sweeps Rules, version 4.6
• Spree Terms of Service, prohibited territories

The B-Two documents were retrieved on August 9, 2026. The help-centre text came from each brand's public Zendesk API, because the browser-facing help pages sit behind a challenge our tools cannot clear; the API returns the same article body plus two timestamps, edited_at for the last change to the body and updated_at for the last change to the record. The dates in the table are edited_at, because that is the one that tracks the state list itself. The updated_at values are later for three brands: McLuck July 29, Mega Bonanza July 31 and SpinBlitz August 2, 2026. Because we read the API rather than the rendered pages, we are not in a position to say what date, if any, a help-centre visitor sees on screen. The site access notices are what those domains serve to a visitor outside the permitted territory, which is how we were able to read them at all. We could not retrieve any of the six brands' full terms of service.

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