Interwetten confiscating winnings

[Ferretktf]

and nowhere in those T&C's is anything that could lead one to this conclusion ... as stated to Bryan

"That means the Bonus should have been calculated on the Net Loss and not credited on the immediate loss."


Particularly in view of both the way it was phrased, the way it operated in reality, and the fact that, as stated by others, this was the second weekend they offered this exact promotion .... if it was wrong then why did they offer it again ?

they also allowed it to run for the full 24 hours without cancelling it - as you would expect them to do if there was a major fault - and it took them five days of locked accounts before they decided to go with the "technical fault" line - clearly this is just fabrication to avoid payment

[vinylweatherman]

and nowhere in those T&C's is anything that could lead one to this conclusion ... as stated to Bryan

"That means the Bonus should have been calculated on the Net Loss and not credited on the immediate loss."


Particularly in view of both the way it was phrased, the way it operated in reality, and the fact that, as stated by others, this was the second weekend they offered this exact promotion .... if it was wrong then why did they offer it again ?

they also allowed it to run for the full 24 hours without cancelling it - as you would expect them to do if there was a major fault - and it took them five days of locked accounts before they decided to go with the "technical fault" line - clearly this is just fabrication to avoid payment

By allowing it to run for the whole 24 hours, and a SECOND time too, they were able to get the MAXIMUM out of players who were REALLY unlucky and lost, but were never going to pay the winners anything other than a return of their starting funds. This created 24 hours where the casino simply could not lose, but allowing this to run mislead players into continuing to play, which clearly included "chasing" bahaviour by one of the players who had to deposit again before finally hitting a winning streak, only to have the winnings confiscated the next day.

It is inconceivable that they did not know of this "technical problem" after the FIRST week, but perhaps they STILL made money overall, so allowed it to run again in the hope of repeating the profitable process. They didn't bargain on PLAYERS analysing the previous weekend's play, and a week was enough for the following weekend to be played far more skillfully, and this seems to have caught them completely by suprise, but there again, they can just do what they bloody well like, they are an online casino.

They have only damaged trust, but it is only the players who WON that have any idea what has gone wrong. Those that LOST (the profitable ones) have NOT had their play voided, and have no idea that if they had managed to win they would have not been paid those winnings. They are probably wondering why the promotion was pullled early, but are probably being told "technical problems", without a proper reason being given.

[Ferretktf]

^^^ Spot on

[Casinomeister]

Okay - the ball is in Interwetten's court; they have the complaints to review and I've expressed how I feel about this situation. I am looking forward to (hoping for) a positive resolution.

[SnowKatt]

I'm making it a habit to avoid any casino that states '' Management decision is final. No discussion will be entered into ".

To me, that clearly advertises the management's unwillingness to resolve an issue and keep their clients happy by pre-exempting themselves from disputes right in the T&C.

Why don't they just say .... "Oh, btw, if you have a discrepancy, you're f**k'd.''

That said, I'm going to go back and RE-read all the T&C of the places I play at, just to make sure. lol....

[vinylweatherman]

I'm making it a habit to avoid any casino that states '' Management decision is final. No discussion will be entered into ".

To me, that clearly advertises the management's unwillingness to resolve an issue and keep their clients happy by pre-exempting themselves from disputes right in the T&C.

Why don't they just say .... "Oh, btw, if you have a discrepancy, you're f**k'd.''

That said, I'm going to go back and RE-read all the T&C of the places I play at, just to make sure. lol....

That would mean quitting online play altogether, the difference is between those casinos that use this term only for FRAUD cases, against those that use it as an excuse for not paying players because they just feel like it, but cannot justify it through the main T & C.

[SnowKatt]

Well, Club world's statement says

17. In the event of a dispute, all decisions made by the casino will be final.

That is a reasonable statement. It does'nt hit me with the impression that they aren't willing to try to reach resolutions before closing the case.

I'm good with that.

[Casinomeister]

Well I just got off of the phone with Interwetten - and yes, there was a problem. It was a technical problem - not a manual malfunction that affected the way in which this played out.

The problem went undiscovered for about a week - the reason for the delay is this: bonus programs will generally operate in the black (make a profit). If it suddenly produces a loss for the casino, then the casino will investigate to see what's wrong - that didn't happen in this situation since the casino didn't get hit hard until the second week. That's when they checked into this.

The bonuses should have been issued on the following day - not immediately. The terms and conditions should have been more concise stating that the bonus was an accumulative bonus - it didn't, but it did say it would be paid out on the next day. The bonus will be credited to the customers account on one of the following days. Side note: they need to hire a native English speaker to write their terms and conditions.

From my understanding, the techno glitch allowed the bonus to be credited right away. For those of you receiving this bonus as such, did you question the CSR on why this was happening, or did you feel this was normal procedure (you read the Terms and Conditions right?)? Players should have been alarmed that something was off.

When the casino found out that there was a malfunction, they sent an incident report to the LGA. The LGA will get back to them within the next eight weeks or so and make a final decision on this. Their terms and conditions clearly state Interwetten may cancel, terminate, modify or suspend the promotion or these terms and conditions at any point and for any reason, including for technical reasons such as and not limited to computer viruses, bugs, tampering or technical failures.

My suggestion for players is to ensure that the LGA has your issue on file so that they have a record of this. The PABs that have come through here will be forwarded to the LGA - I think we have four.

End note: I don't believe anyone is out of pocket since this was backrolled to the first deposits, right? They can't simply remove bonuses from winnings from players who were using these bonuses to generate winnings. That can't be done.

[Ferretktf]

thanks Bryan

Did they tell you what they did to accounts that actually made a NETT LOSS (after bonuses).

By their explanation they should have refunded their losses - yes? In fact they should have voided all play for the entire 24 hour period (as all games counted towards the bonus). Every single player should have been impacted in either a positive or negative way.

We have anecdotal evidence from other players that this did not happen -- i.e. Interwetten kept the profits from the losing players, while denying the winnings to the successful players.

Net result

Winning players = level
Losing players = losers
Interwetten = winners.

Had I bust out (I was down to my last £100 from a £2500 bankroll - I had no more funds available to deposit had that gone) then I am 100% convinced that my £2500 would not have been returned to me and that I would probably still be none the wiser today - I would have just put it down to bad luck, and kicked myself for chasing my losses.



I did PAB so thanks for forwarding it on. Will I receive the decision of the LGA from you, or will they contact me? Should I follow-up with the LGA or wait for the eight weeks to run its course?

as an aside, I am a little concerned that this seems to be accepted as a technical error - for which they appear to have get-out clauses, when I still believe the promotion worked the way it was written, i.e. if there was an error it was human, in the way that they structured the promotion. What are your expectations of the likely outcome?

For those of you receiving this bonus as such, did you question the CSR on why this was happening, or did you feel this was normal procedure (you read the Terms and Conditions right?)? Players should have been alarmed that something was off.

No .. .there as no need to contact CSR because this is what I expected having read the terms and conditions where it said for each £100 lost, £10 would be credited. That is precisely what was happening so I certainly wasn't alarmed.

[thelawnet]

Well I just got off of the phone with Interwetten - and yes, there was a problem. It was a technical problem - not a manual malfunction that affected the way in which this played out.

The problem went undiscovered for about a week - the reason for the delay is this: bonus programs will generally operate in the black (make a profit). If it suddenly produces a loss for the casino, then the casino will investigate to see what's wrong - that didn't happen in this situation since the casino didn't get hit hard until the second week. That's when they checked into this.

The bonuses should have been issued on the following day - not immediately. The terms and conditions should have been more concise stating that the bonus was an accumulative bonus - it didn't, but it did say it would be paid out on the next day.

So they are admitting they didn't say it was a cumulative bonus.

They are only arguing on a technicality that the bonus should have been credited on the following day but was credited the same day.

That is their ONLY basis for this.

The bonus will be credited to the customers account on one of the following days. Side note: they need to hire a native English speaker to write their terms and conditions.

From my understanding, the techno glitch allowed the bonus to be credited right away. For those of you receiving this bonus as such, did you question the CSR on why this was happening, or did you feel this was normal procedure (you read the Terms and Conditions right?)? Players should have been alarmed that something was off.

I don't see why.

As you note, the terms are a bit stilted in their English.

Sunday Cashback Madness

How it works:

For every EUR 100,00 you lose at the Interwetten Online Casino, you get EUR 10,00 back.

Terms and Conditions:

This promotion is valid to all Interwetten Casino Real Money customers.
Promotion days in February 2008 are:
Sunday, 03.02.2008 00:00 CET bis 23:59 CET
Sunday, 10.02.2008 00:00 CET bis 23:59 CET
Sunday, 17.02.2008 00:00 CET bis 23:59 CET
Sunday, 24.02.2008 00:00 CET bis 23:59 CET

This promotion is subject to Interwetten Casino standard rules, terms and conditions.

To qualify for the cashback bonus you must make a transfer of funds from your Sportsbook real money account in to Casino chips and wager at least EUR 100,00 on the respective promotion day at Interwetten Online Casino.

For each EUR 100,00 loss at the Interwetten Online Casino, the customer will get EUR 10,00 Chips credited to his Interwetten Casino account.

The bonus will be credited to the customers account on one of the following days. There are no wager requirements for the Cashback Bonus.

Interwetten Casino reserves the right to refuse all promotions and bonuses to players who do not comply with this condition.

Interwetten may cancel, terminate, modify or suspend the promotion or these terms and conditions at any point and for any reason, including for technical reasons such as and not limited to computer viruses, bugs, tampering or technical failures.

We will remove prize credits from the account of any member who fails to comply with any of the above conditions.

Management decision is final. No discussion will be entered into.

Those conditions are additional to the regular terms and conditions that you can find here.

The sentence "The bonus will be credited to the customers account on one of the following days." is gobbledegook frankly. It doesn't say "the bonus will be credited to the player's account the day after the promotion". It says "one of the following days". To me, the most logical reading of that is that it is referring to the days of the promotion (i.e. the Sundays, 3rd, 10th, 17th, 24th February, that is the days I played on). Nobody writes "one of the following dayS" when they mean the next DAY.

So in the first instance, the terms certainly do not say to me 'the bonus will be given to you the next day'. When you're playing and you start playing and a bonus is credited to your account with every loss, and you notice (and let's assume that you do notice, because when you read confused prose like that in the Interwetten terms, it's not necessarily even going to register, it just washes over you, a sludge of legalese (did you read every term in the last contract you signed?). You don't spent half an hour with a lawyer and a legal dictionary. You read the terms, you look for anything like 'no video poker allowed', and then you play. You don't start lexical analysis on the text) the terms say "The bonus will be credited to the customers account on one of the following days. ", you assume that the following days is a reference to the promotion days, and they just haven't ordered their terms properly.

So that's the first point. They claim that their terms said the bonus would be credited the next day. I dispute this. It's certainly ambiguous.

And according to Maltese Law (http://docs.justice.gov.mt/lom/legis...0/chapt378.pdf, at 46), "terms shall be written in plain and intelligible language which can be
understood by the consumers to whom the contract is directed", and moreover "Where any term is ambivalent or any doubt arises about the
meaning of a term, the interpretation most favourable to the
consumer shall prevail".

Clearly there is quite some doubt, the terms are neither plain nor intelligible.

Quite apart from their attempts to cling to this appallingly written sentence, which as I have shown, fail to save them, the fact is that even if the terms HAD said "we will pay the bonus into your account the next day", and they had credited it the same day, it's not grounds to void people's winnings.

Whether they give me €10 on Sunday or Monday it's still €10.

I had several thousand pounds in my interwetten sports account. Most of the money never got transferred to my casino account, because I went about £4k up in the course of a few hands. I later went on a losing run which meant my final profit was about £1500. They seem to be saying that the bonus money in my account shielded me from depositing more, but that argument is utterly fatuous, because as soon as my balance reached zero, I would transfer more from the ample balance I had in my sports account. You're not going to transfer more money in while there is still money there.

It's just wrong for them to say, 'I know you didn't ask to have the money put in on Sunday, I know you had plenty of cash in your sports account, but because we put the money in on Sunday, and are claiming we should have put it in on Monday, that means we get to keep all your winnings'.

It's cowboy behaviour to say 'we put the money in a day early [which is disputed anyway], so we get to keep all your winnings'. WTF? Does this make sense to ANYONE?

When the casino found out that there was a malfunction, they sent an incident report to the LGA. The LGA will get back to them within the next eight weeks or so and make a final decision on this. Their terms and conditions clearly state Interwetten may cancel, terminate, modify or suspend the promotion or these terms and conditions at any point and for any reason, including for technical reasons such as and not limited to computer viruses, bugs, tampering or technical failures.

There is no malfunction. The system did exactly what they told it to do. Chartwell software, which they use, operates like this. Betfair had a very similar promotion.

There is absolutely not, categorically not, any malfunction.

The only error is the incompetent casino managers who don't understand basic mathematics. That is not the same as a malfunction.

It is not a malfunction when a slots player plays penny slots with a 15% edge until he has lost £10k. He can't ask for a refund, he can't say he had a 'technical reason' (i.e. stupidity), and didn't realise what he was doing, and neither can a professional, multi-million annual profit casino that expects players to entrust them with their personal details, bank account records, and potentially thousands of euros of their cash. They CANNOT welch on its bets on the basis that 'our promotion was not profitable for us'.

My suggestion for players is to ensure that the LGA has your issue on file so that they have a record of this. The PABs that have come through here will be forwarded to the LGA - I think we have four.

Thanks.

Should I forward them my post here? Do you have a reference or something that I can attach it to?

End note: I don't believe anyone is out of pocket since this was backrolled to the first deposits, right? They can't simply remove bonuses from winnings from players who were using these bonuses to generate winnings. That can't be done.

I think everybody is out of pocket at the moment, because they were retrospectively told that it was a bet that they were not allowed to win. That bet only has two options: lose or get nothing. It's not a fair bet, and it's not something a reputable casino should do.

I don't understand why these guys can't step up to the plate and justify themselves properly.

They refuse to answer emails, they refuse to answer phone calls, they refuse to respond on here, and take up your time instead. Businesses make mistakes, they learn from them, take the hit, attract goodwill from it, and move on. As far as I can see they are happy to trash their reputation for a matter of what does not appear to be a huge sum of money for what I understand to be quite a big operation. As an operator, you would shut the promotion down when the mathematics of it started to hit home, you would panic for a while, but then you have to clean things up and face the music. They have refused to do this, and as such the Maltese authorities should take action against them for:

* breach of Maltese law on attempting to construe their terms in their favour as it suits them
* attempting to argue that because THEY credited the bonus a day early (so they claim), they don't have to pay anybody, profiting by their mistake (or they claim it was a mistake) - effectively arguing that they are not responsible for their own actions, and any mistakes they make can be used to screw the player
* arguing that their error of judgement is a 'malfunction', when it is nothing of the kind (a malfunction is something like a blackjack game that comes up 21 every hand, not a promotion that behaves exactly as described)
* welching on bets
* ignoring emails
* refusing to talk to customers. Not an acceptable level of customer service.

The level of acceptable service for an online casino is really not that difficult to define. Just basic stuff. Answer the phones, respond to emails, pay your winners. Let's hope they reach this level soon.