Safety of Float

[MarcWiseman]

Worst case scenario, I get a virus or Keylogger on my computer and someone gains access to my Betfair account.

As far as I am aware, Betfair withdrawals must amount to deposits from a selected deposit method before any other cards/banks can be used.

My float has built up mainly from betting and not direct deposits to Betfair, so if someone gained access to my account a fair whack could be lost.

I was wondering if I could withdraw my float, or the majority of it, and then re-deposit immediately to secure my funds. Any advice as whether this could be done would be appreciated.

Cheers

[hazard]

can't you ask betfair to lock the other withdrawal methods?

[Andy]

I was wondering if I could withdraw my float, or the majority of it, and then re-deposit immediately to secure my funds. Any advice as whether this could be done would be appreciated.

You could but it would not secure your funds, the redeposit would set the Net deposits back to positive (if I have read it correctly).

Regardless of this your funds would still not be safe, they would get your £s out of your account to themselves by laying and event at 1.01 on an obscure market and using your account to back it at those odds moving it to them. OR they could use the Poker room to "chip dump" the balance to themselves, making you go all in on rubbish hands to their mates.

If someone gets hold of your betfair log ins expect to lose it all very quickly one way or another. You will get some assistance getting it back by betfair but not a lot.

[hazard]

Andy don't you know if they perform IP lock? That would considerably reduce the fraud.

[munk]

Andy don't you know if they perform IP lock? That would considerably reduce the fraud.

I think someone mentioned on the recent Moneybookers fraud thread that you can lock your Betfair account down to certain IP addresses:

http://www.thegamblingtimes.com/boar...y-account.html

Worth reading that OP for ideas on securing accounts.

[MarcWiseman]

You could but it would not secure your funds, the redeposit would set the Net deposits back to positive (if I have read it correctly).

Regardless of this your funds would still not be safe, they would get your £s out of your account to themselves by laying and event at 1.01 on an obscure market and using your account to back it at those odds moving it to them. OR they could use the Poker room to "chip dump" the balance to themselves, making you go all in on rubbish hands to their mates.

If someone gets hold of your betfair log ins expect to lose it all very quickly one way or another. You will get some assistance getting it back by betfair but not a lot.

Cheers for clearing it up Andy.

What kind of safety measures are people taking here with matched betting? Anti-virus software, changing passwords etc..

[Andy]

Mainly I have about half a douzen active accounts at any one time, for various reasons, but a knock on effect is that "if" one got hacked into the amount in there would at least be limited to that amount, which is 15/20% of the total "Betfair" amount I have.

Other than that just hope it is not hacked into, it is quite hard to do, get the password wrong 6 times I think it is and you are locked out. More than once I have locked myself out by just getting the Capital letters in the wrong places, so forcing your way in is virtually impossible I believe.

[AmeliesDad]

I think someone mentioned on the recent Moneybookers fraud thread that you can lock your Betfair account down to certain IP addresses:

After I had a run-in with betfair's fraud department I tried that. IIRC you could limit it to a set of countries, so I checked my login history and chose UK and Netherlands as that's all the addresses it said I'd ever logged in from. I could never log in again until I called them back up and got it removed. YMMV

[dulence]

Sorry to ruin your show, but that provides little to no security mostly for the reason that IP addresses are so easy to spoof that limiting to a certain range provides no protection. Furthermore, all IP addresses I've logged on to betfair from are marked as being from UK whereas I've never logged on from other than my home which is quite a few thousand kilometers away from Britain. I've considered paying extra to my ISP so that they provide me with a static IP address and then I could limit logins to my betfair account from that IP only, although, at least for the time being, the increase in service cost is not anywhere near justifyible by reduced risk.

[munk]

IP addresses are so easy to spoof

In order to spoof an IP address for the purposes we're talking about (ie having a two way network conversation) you would need to be able to access the network address in question and then set up an outgoing connection from that net address to the site in question. There's no easy way to spoof a specific IP address without acquiring a network connection to the address you're trying to spoof in the first place.

You can fairly easily spoof the IP address by manipulating the packets sent so they contain a different IP address from that which they actually come from, BUT you will not see any replies since the target webserver etc will be sending it's responses back to the forged IP address.

Unless you meant 'spoof an IP address within a country block'? That is a little easier if you used a proxy within that country's net block so it appeared that you were legitimately coming from that country. But then again there are ways to detect proxy access (looking at HTTP headers for 'forwarded' headers).

Or again perhaps you meant spoof a MAC address which is also a little easier (albeit useless for the purpose of circumnavigating IP address restrictions).

BUT then again all my network skills might be rusty, perhaps I missed something in the last couple of years!!!