BET365 - A story of non payment and recovery!

[Larryspinboy]

This story is described in the title and I felt it appropriate to share my experience with BET365 with you and see if anybody else has had a similar problem!

On 7th December I joined BET365 and deposited £200 via my credit card for the £200 bonus.

I imediately found an exact match for Shaktar Donestsk @ 1.66 so placed my £200 on them. After geteing the code by email and nputting it immediately i had my £200 bonus - Great effort....

My plan here was to come out with either around £160/£170 in one hit or bigup the bonus and playthrough after my first bets in excess of £200 up.

I did this and as Shaktar won i was £230 ish up with nearly £667 in the account - No real problem here you would think!!

On a day off on 9th December i thought i would entertain myself with BET365 and the days races - My intention to place around £100 bets and if the odds didn't work my way I would underlay a bit!

I bet on 6 races winning a couple for small profits but overall lost about £20 of my profit so far - but I was not unhappy with that really - Still around £200ish up with £226 left in my account and a remaining playthrough of around £350!

Then at the 1730 @ Kempton I found a gee gee, Flying Power, @ 4.00
in BET365 and the lay odds showing on Betfair were 3.85. So in true style I pumped the whole £226 on Flying Power and underlaid a bit but getting all my lay taken at 3.85 - I was pretty happy at this stage!

Flying Power lived up to its name and romped home giving me returns of £904 and my profit so far was now back in the £220's - This is where it all went wrong.

With a just over a hundred of playthrough left BET365 limited my winnings on ANY bet to just £10!

I initially live chatted them and was told it was a trading decision, something i was to become used to over the next few days......

Unable to budge BET365 I randomnly bet on various football fixtures, some of them punts!, until i had met playthrough and my account read a balance of £962.17, fully withdrawable funds. Profit was just under £200 so I was pretty happy. Withdrawal requested.

The following day, whilst checking my emails, i found a nice one from BET365 telling me they were unhappy with my betting patterns and were linking me to other accounts and as such they would be withholding my withdrawal as it was all profit from my bonus - I believe they used the term bonus abuser!!

Que - Live Chat.........

I spoke (live chat) to 'Mark' whos stock response to all my answers was it was a 'traders decision'............A number of times I tried to clarify what that jargon actually meant and his reponse was 'thats all I can tell you'

Que - Argument about putting me on to someone who could tell me all about it!

Finally I got a name, Sarah, who I could contact by telephone and of course I did........

Initally I got the same responses from Sarah about 'traders decisions' and 'linked accounts' and 'bonus abusing' blah blah blah

Sarah couldn't explain the 'traders decision'

Sarah explained that the 'linked accounts' had been opened from my IP address - I pushed this point a bit as I have being living at my current adddress for five years and nobody had EVER opened a betting account with BET365 from my address before

Que - Arguement with Sarah 'Yes they have' 'No they havent' etc etc

Refusing to budge from this I explained to Sarah that in light of what she was telling me I would contact the local police and inform them I was the victim of a burglary as that was the ONLY way somebody could have entered my house and joined a BET365 account from there.........This idea seemed to distress her a bit and off she went to speak to her 'Supervisor'

A few minutes later Sarah returned and expplained that in the interests of goodwill they would refund my £200 initial deposit to ensure I did not 'lose' from the situation........Clearly she has no idea how much I had laid against these winnings!!!!

Sensing weakness I thanked her for the money returned and suggested I was satisfied with this before playing my trump card..................The Columbo affect...........'Just one more thing................'

After accepting the offer in principle I then became very indignant again and pushed for more information as to how this had happened - She refused to accept they were wrong but would not/could not clarify with specifics.

I then suggested that I be provided in writing of the information suggesting more than one account had been opened from my IP address and the so called irregular betting patterns............

To be fair I now sensed that Sarah was actually on my side and she agreed to sound out the 'Traders' and come back to me ( clearly i checked before she went that the £200 offer stood regardless!)

Approximately 1 hr later Sarah rang me back and stated that having reconsidered my predicement they would refund ALL my winnings and she would process the withdrawal for me. She was a good girl Sarah. She refused to be drawn, and I refused to push, why/how this had happened.

Thankyou Sarah!

Unfortunately this was not the end and sarah didn't actaully process my withdrawal, I did the following day, and before paying out they requested a copy of my passport, which I sent happily.

After receiving my passport they then requested a PVC code that was initially sent to my address when I opened the account but I had in fact binned!!

I requested another PVC which after a couple of requests they sent and FINALLY today I received a full refund of £962.17!

Alls well that ends well - BUT!

Without and understanding CR (Sarah) this would not have been a happy ending!

How many times have BET365 done this and got away with it? - Has this happend to anybody else?

I suppose here the nmoral of the story is be persitent and don't accept the hiding behind 'traders decisions'.....unless of course you have done wrong!!!]


Sorry it was such a long rant BUT if this stops one other person being swindled out thier legitimate winnings then it was worth the effort!

Merry Xmas!

[Landprofits]

How many times have BET365 done this and got away with it? - Has this happend to anybody else?

It's quite common for 365 to put limits on people's accounts making it impossible for them to meet the rollover.

Only way to resolve it (one way or the other) is usually a dispute.

The PVC code thing is just standard withdrawal procedure.

Most stories I have heard of people getting limited during rollover have been due to taking out of line odds on horses. Backing at 4 and laying at 3.85 is out of line.

The Shakhtar Donetsk v Braga match was obviously matched closely but a Champions League match would bring plenty of liquidity into the market so nothing unusual about your action there really from 365's point of view.

Don't know what the IP thing was about. May well be standard "script" when they identify a potential bonus abuser.

LP

[munk]

Yes it's not uncommon to be limited quite heavily - they're known as 'Bet £3.65' because of it. You might find that on EPL games on the weekend you can get quite a lot more on (up to £200 win limits at weekend and maybe £100 before the weekend, £50 on championship etc).

I've not heard that kind of story though regarding having funds withheld and them refusing to pay out because of suspected bonus abuse. I'm sure it does happen though and I'm sure a lot of times it will be fairly legitimate - either because it IS blatant abuse/fraud or because they're NOT partner/household friendly and more than one person from the same family/household signs up and gets caught, but haven't heard of it being reported too often so either people who do get caught out are guilty to some degree... but I'm sure they do make mistakes as well and as times get harder with the recession I think a lot of bookies are starting to become a little tighter with cracking down.

A few other things it might have been - maybe you use an ISP that has a shared web cache perhaps, so it might look as though more than one person is signing up from the same IP address or if you use wifi maybe someone could steal the connection. Both are long shots though so doubt it's either of those, they probably just didn't like you winning mainly.

[Odysseus]

This shared IP address thing seems like just an excuse IMO. Something they come up with as a smokescreen when they just identify someone who they don't like who hits their weak lines. It's something that you can't disprove and they're unlikely to have to substantiate in any legal forum.
I know of couples who have operated two accounts from the same computer for many months and never had the shared IP thing thrown at them. Maybe lucky, yes, but their detection methods can't be very sophisticated if they can't spot abuse such as this. Probably some spotty-faced junior trader randomly checking through bet IP data.

[cripery]

The whole shared IP address thing must be so unreliable it's ridiculous. I moved house not long ago and ended up moving to an ISP that only does dynamic IP addresses, previously i'd been on a static IP address at my old house. The connection here is pretty poor and my connection drops and reconnects at least a couple of times a day. And, as you'd expect, every time I get reconnected I get a different IP address.

So since I've lived here I must have gone through hundreds of IP's. You'd have thought that quite a few times the IP address I've used one day to sign on to bookies will have been used at some time in the past and in the future to sign on to the same bookies but different accounts.

How they can think that IP addresses are some sort of unique identifier is beyond me.

[Fender]

Bookies these days are a joke. Back in the good old days 70s-80s, when I ran several shops, we never refused a bet, nor did we ever limit or close an account,never!!!

If we thought someone was a bit too sharp for us, we would lay the bet off, We wouldnt have embarrased ourselves or our reputation by taking any action against the punter.