HQ Trivia Doesn’t Always Pay Players Their Winnings And Won’t Say Why

For months, players in HQ Trivia, a trivia app that offers cash prizes, say they have been having issues getting their money.

HQ Trivia is basically Bar Trivia: The App. Twice a day, every day, there’s a live trivia show, hosted on the app, that has a pool of cash that goes out to the winners. HQ Trivia players also have to deal with a rising epidemic of cheating, with users joining Discord servers to discuss answers with other players, or even writing bots that will pick the correct answers. The prevalence of cheating first became clear last March when one of the final players in a $25,000 “winner takes all” game was booted for cheating.

Cheating isn’t the only rampant problem in HQ, though. Since at least October of last year, players have been having problems cashing out their winnings. After you have won at least $20 in the app, you can transfer your money to PayPal. A lot of players have been saying that even after reaching the $20 minimum, their cash out button is still grayed out, meaning they can’t tap it and receive their winnings.

Since August of last year, multiple players have reached out to Kotaku to inform us of this problem, after having tried and failed to get HQ Trivia’s attention. Some of these players say they were able to receive their winnings after a couple of days, but they still had to wait to cash out, despite being over the $20 limit. Other players still haven’t been able to cash out at all. All of the players that told Kotaku they reached out to HQ about the problem said that they did not receive a response from the company.

One player who has won $150 from HQ and hasn’t been able to cash out since October told Kotaku that, since then, they’ve stopped playing HQ.

“I don’t care to play HQ anymore since the experience of being unable to cash out is so frustrating,” they wrote via Twitter DM. “It’s also frustrating that they decide someone is ineligible to win AFTER they have divided up the money, so a lot of the money from the prize pot does not end up going to anyone.”

Fans have speculated that this bug may be arising because of players getting falsely flagged as cheaters. HQ’s “Official Contest Rules” specify that “entrants may not communicate with, work with, or otherwise benefit from more than 25 other persons while entering a Contest if the communications between the entrant and those persons is facilitated by any technological means other than those explicitly provided by Sponsor.” Basically, if you’re in a Discord server during a game, you might be flagged as a cheater, and will be unable to cash out. A representative from HQ Trivia told Kotaku that “HQ reviews all cashout requests for eligibility. The average cashout time is less than one day.”

HQ appears steadfast in their rules, which probably do prevent cheaters from fraudulently winning money. Unfortunately, it also means that a lot of players are left out in the cold.