Beware of BetDAQ hidden withdrawal fees

[kamoon]

My withdrawal was rejected and €65.65 was taken from my account without a warning.

I received an email from them:

From the 1st November 2009 when the free Moneybooker Fees were introduced, you generated €21.51 in commission, however you incurred €87.16 in money booker fees (€4,358.20 @2%)

Therefore as per Our terms and conditions we have made a manual adjustment to your account of €65.65.This adjustment can be seen on your account statement.
Free Fees terms and conditions:

• Unless otherwise stated in the deposits page on the website, BETDAQ will absorb the cost of all fees subject to the members total commission paid being equal or greater than the cost of the fees.

• We reserve the right to charge customers who are deemed to be abusing this offer the full rate.

• BETDAQ reserves the right to withdraw this offer at any time, without prior notice


I have never seen these terms and can't find them on their site. This is rogue. Better to stick with Betfair!
I have filed an SBR complaint and will keep you posted on how this will be settled.

[kamoon]

The problem is that if you are laying in Betdaq at odds above evens your liability will always be larger than the amount you can win and therefore you can never pay enough commission to cover the 2% charges unless you make multiple and multiple bets in between deposits and withdrawals. If they will begin to enforce this they will greatly reduce the amount of people who want to lay bets there.

[Nintendo2k]

Pretty stupid of them to just take your money. They should at least have given you the chance to play through it until you lose or until you generate enough commission to pay for the fees.

I recently talked to them about lowering my commission and they said yes. No way am I going back there now.

[Super_Dash]

This has huge implications for me, all my world cup commission breaks seem useless now. I'll have to have a serious look into my profit and losses to see how it all balances out. But the fact I'll require around £200 of commission just doesn't seem promising.

[CountryLad]

I don't use BD much, except for laying off BF offers, and where there is a clear advantage to using them (e.g. they have a market which BF doesn't have, or advantageous commission). But from now on, I'm going to ask them to confirm clearly in writing that I won't incur charges before each withdrawal.

[musicbox]

What concerns me most is the removal of funds without telling you. Even if the policy is in the terms somewhere (and that is an if as I can't find it either) then an email to let you know that proceeding with the withdrawal will incur the fee clawback would be proper.

By removing the funds in such a way, all they've likely created is a situation whereby you don't want to play there again and other people read your complaint and think the same.

If they had told you then I imagine you would have declined the payout, left your money in and played through some bets to earn the commission difference (and potentially more).

And their terms do say: "There may be costs relating to the transfer of funds into or out of Members' Accounts which, wherever possible, will be notified to the Member in advance of his/her agreement to proceed with a transfer instruction." It's a cost to you and why was it not possible to notify you?

All I can see on their site is a red banner in the deposit area saying "All Neteller and Moneybookers deposits are now free!" alongside "Terms and conditions apply" - the banner links to nothing and there's no sign of such terms there?!

There's a banner in the withdrawal area saying "All Neteller withdrawals are now free". That too links to nothing. There is nothing in the final page where the withdrawal/deposit is enacted. I can see nothing in their terms either. If this is the policy, I would like to be able to see it.

On their forum, their own admin posted:

"Important Message -

Please note that there are no deposit fees attached with using either Moneybookers or Neteller - 0%.

Kind Regards

Betdaq

Expiry date for offer - 31/03/10"

Again, no link to anything which suggests these fees are clawed back.

I'm not surprised by sites having such policies, especially if they're aimed at stopping people depositing to withdraw without playing but I am surprised they just took the money without telling you.

[CountryLad]

I have found the terms on their site. The key point is that these are 'deposit fees', when initially I looked for withdrawal terms.

Deposit by Moneybookers

You get to this page by clicking 'Help' on the purple bar on the homepage. Click on 'accounts' on the flash menu system that appears on the left of the popup window that appears, then click 'Deposit', and then 'Deposit by Moneybookers'.

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I'm intending to pull all of my funds, but sent an email to their accounts earlier this afternoon asking them to confirm that I won't be charged (I'm confident that the account review that will likely be triggered by this won't be a problem).

The key point in this episode is something fundamental to all books; player confidence. If players do not have this confidence then they will go elsewhere. As Music says in his post above, they should not make debits without warning; behaving in this way loses the player confidence pretty comprehensively. This lack of confidence is why I will now be sending an email before each withdrawal.

Betdaq are an intelligent outfit, so the confidence issue is something which I think their management should understand, and so I suspect/hope this will only be a transient problem now that it is public.

Best of luck kamoon, I'd fight this one too.

[munk]

The only reason I can imagine Betdaq would do that would be if you haven't turned over the amount you've deposited fully? It's hard to say though with the information you've given - how many bets did you make, what commission rate where you on, what kind of profits and losses did you generate?

I don't expect you to answer fully on the forum because a. it is complicated, b. it is private and c. is now an ongoing / unresolved complaint that you have opened with SBR - but my point is that if you only placed winning back bets worth a total of 700eur at odds of 2 to generate commission of around 20eur at a commission rate of 3% (say), then I can see their point to some degree, you've not wagered the deposit through fully and they have a right to feel aggrieved about that.

However I can see a scenario where you have turned the money over and generated a large amount of implied revenue (ie when you lost money) and if that's the case then that's not fair.

Regardless though, I would tend to agree with what has been said above that it's not right them just taking the money from you without offering you the chance to not withdraw and instead continue wagering until the required amount in commission has been generated.

[musicbox]

I have found the terms on their site. The key point is that these are 'deposit fees', when initially I looked for withdrawal terms.

Deposit by Moneybookers

You get to this page by clicking 'Help' on the purple bar on the homepage. Click on 'accounts' on the flash menu system that appears on the left of the popup window that appears, then click 'Deposit', and then 'Deposit by Moneybookers'.

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Good work! Finding that was a bit like participating in a mystery game from the Crystal Maze

[CountryLad]

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