think twice before depositing : 138, 12Bet, Fun88 and TLCbet

colinsunderland

RIP Colin
Joined
Jan 28, 2016
Location
uk
This is mainly bookmaker related but as they have casino's too thought a heads up might be worth posting.

Many news stories about these banning players for apparent bonus abuse today, a few linked below, to show its not just one or 2 disgruntled customers.

For what its worth, I've spoken to TLC bet live chat today and been lied to time and time again, given wrong advice, and they refused to let me see the terms and conditions saying they had been removed and they couldn't access them any more! Fun88 have removed live chat from the website.

I hope people think twice before depositing with these, at least until they explain whats going on, I wouldn't like to see anyone else lose money.

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I'll be interested to see how the gambling commission handles this. Hope they get shut down, such scumbags.

I was in the process of adding 138 to my sites but won't do so now.
 
I'll be interested to see how the gambling commission handles this. Hope they get shut down, such scumbags.

I was in the process of adding 138 to my sites but won't do so now.

Probably for the best, if they scam players, affiliates have no chance of getting paid. For what its worth, their tracking sucks too, so you would probably be wasting your time anyway.

Heres a bit from live chat showing what they are like

(08:36:44) Visitor 49412478: can you link me to the terms and conditions for the day 1 douvan 5/2 offer please
(08:37:44) Violet: We no longer have the terms of that particular promotion as it has been removed already.
(08:38:41) Visitor 49412478: you are joking? So you accuse me of violating the terms of an offer, but now refuse to show me the terms? You must have an archived copy somewhere I can see
(08:40:38) Violet: Regrettably, that has been removed already from our website.
 
Probably for the best, if they scam players, affiliates have no chance of getting paid. For what its worth, their tracking sucks too, so you would probably be wasting your time anyway.

Heres a bit from live chat showing what they are like

(08:36:44) Visitor 49412478: can you link me to the terms and conditions for the day 1 douvan 5/2 offer please
(08:37:44) Violet: We no longer have the terms of that particular promotion as it has been removed already.
(08:38:41) Visitor 49412478: you are joking? So you accuse me of violating the terms of an offer, but now refuse to show me the terms? You must have an archived copy somewhere I can see
(08:40:38) Violet: Regrettably, that has been removed already from our website.

Players should take them to the small claims court and require them to produce the terms and conditions as applied at the time the bets were accepted in order to prove their claim that said terms were violated. There may well be other sources of these terms, Google cache for example.

The mere act of removing the terms is an indication that they have something to hide.
 
Looks like they are taking a battering on social media etc. It looks like their reputation is already damaged beyond repair which is unsurprising.

If/when they gut shutdown will be interesting to see if the player funds have been seggregated.
 
The only real "suspicious activity" is that the favourites dominated, and all bookies took a big hit. It's almost impossible to abuse the kind of offer involved here as it was an after wager free bet of £25. It's pretty obvious that coupled with the card being dominated by the favourites, these four firms were hit really hard because they didn't make money from the bets made to qualify for the free bet, and in addition probably saw many of these free bets win. They also offered this every day, not just once per player.

Unless players had inside information about the likely winners, or there was some race fixing going on, the only "abuse" is betting on the favourites, and given how bookies work, this is a self fulfilling feedback system as whatever horse is most heavily backed ends up as the favourite.

There only real way out here is to convince the UK Jockey Club that the Cheltenham meeting needs to be investigated for some kind of race fixing attempt, which would naturally lead to insiders seeking to profit from placing bets on horses they know are most likely to win. If the Jockey Club rules that the race was fixed, bookies can then void the bets made on them. This does occasionally happen, and it makes punters angry because many have not been involved in the match fixing.

If there was real concern about "suspicious betting activity", then ALL bookies would be investigating bets made at the meeting, not just this one firm.

This has all the hallmarks of the Betfair scandal, a generous promotion that went badly wrong because of a failure to properly cost it before making it live. No terms were breached, it was simply a case of much greater demand for the promo than had been anticipated. In the latter case, the fact that the favourites dominated meant that the promo here amplified the losses made on the meeting, rather than boosted turnover and thus profits, which would have happened had there been a more even mix of winners.

Maybe they should have made this a free £25 bet only for punters who were unlucky. This would have meant fewer free bets than anticipated having been given out as many punters were in profit because the favourites kept winning.

Maybe they are between a rock and a hard place, simply not having the funds to pay out for all these winners, so are relying on wriggling out of it by using this "suspicious activity" provision along with breaches of terms and conditions.
 
Update

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"The GSC will gather information from both customers and licensees in a two-stage inquiry expected to take 'some time'.

"All parties have been promised an opportunity to state their case, and the Commission says it will make a recommendation to resolve the issue once all the evidence has been reviewed.

"There has been no comment yet from Douglas-based Xela Holdings which operates the gaming brands.

"Island police have referred complaints to Action Fraud, the national fraud and cyber crime reporting centre in the UK."
 
The reason why this happened was due to an influx of bonus abusers from sites like MSE and PA

more people abusing then not

they should have offered to only previous/loyal users and a increased freebet for new users
 
The reason why this happened was due to an influx of bonus abusers from sites like MSE and PA

more people abusing then not

they should have offered to only previous/loyal users and a increased freebet for new users

Thats what some of the offers were, the reason this happened was quite simply because they offered bonuses that they didn't expect to lose on, they could have pulled them at any point but kept taking the cash, not expecting all the favourites to win.

They should have carried out proper KYC checks and not just applied a blanket account closure to everyone who had opened an account with them, now its came back to bite them in the arse, and they have paid some customers out who they had previously told weren't getting a penny.

Disgusting company and hopefully this will result in them getting no new customers ever again.
 
Thats what some of the offers were, the reason this happened was quite simply because they offered bonuses that they didn't expect to lose on, they could have pulled them at any point but kept taking the cash, not expecting all the favourites to win.

They should have carried out proper KYC checks and not just applied a blanket account closure to everyone who had opened an account with them, now its came back to bite them in the arse, and they have paid some customers out who they had previously told weren't getting a penny.

Disgusting company and hopefully this will result in them getting no new customers ever again.

Before PA the companies would still have sharps but the proportion was much lower

aggressive PA advertising has lead to this, even KYC checks wouldnt have worked as they were still genuine customers

The day of generous sports offers is now truly over
 
It seems to me that if previously disqualified players have since been paid, at least some of these bookmaking sites are having second thoughts about whether there really was 'bonus abuse' in all cases.

Was that on management review of a perhaps over-hasty and questionable confiscation of winnings, or was it because of the widespread media coverage and regulator attention demanding a more detailed justification for management's actions?
 
138.com

I'll be interested to see how the gambling commission handles this. Hope they get shut down, such scumbags.

I was in the process of adding 138 to my sites but won't do so now.

I play at their casino tbh Ive never had any problems, always had quick payout and support staff good
 
It's not "bonus abuse" or "fraud" just because they gained far more new customers than expected and the favourites won the races. It is simply bad marketing based on false assumptions. They decided to use an aggressive marketing campaign off the back of some of the biggest race meetings in the country, April also sees the Grand National, a unique race that even draws in non gamblers who will ONLY bet once a year and on that specific race. It is not unknown in the industry for this "nightmare scenario" to play out where all the favourites dominate at a big race meeting, and this possibility should have been allowed for in the calculations.

Since this was an after wager free bet, ONLY given once a customer had signed up and made enough bets with their own money, it can't really be "bonus abused". Any loss here is down to the favourites' domination of the meeting, and the fact that a significant amount of the punters' winnings came from the free bet, which won along with the paid for bets they made to qualify. This effectively boosted the odds being offered on the favourites to an unsustainable level, with the firms relying on this being a "normal" race meeting where plenty of outsiders win races so that they can rake in profits from all the losing bets made on the favourites.

Even if customers signed up at all four portals, this too was engineered by design by the marketing department who deliberately trained staff to lie to customers who asked whether they could sign up at all four by telling them that they were not related, they were all independent and they could sign up "here", even though they had already signed up at one of the other portals.

In the end, they are trying to renege on bets and confiscate legitimate winnings due to the incompetence of their own marketing department based on the greed of the company to snare as many new customers as possible, with little regard to the quality of the new business they attracted.

This is really Betfair all over again. They are now trying to blame consumers for doing what companies have been doing for years, using science to maximise revenue and profit. It's OK for companies to employ top psychologists to dream up subtle ways of tapping into our subconscious minds and base instincts in order to design advertising, stores, and websites such that they subvert our conscious processes and lead us into making decisions that maximise profit, but it's "fraud" if consumers get together into a community and apply the same level of "science" and collective reasoning in order to get the best possible deal from a company. MSE is all about consumers sharing knowledge, and where the regular consumer can discuss a deal with the "super savvy consumer" such that there is a considerable increase in the number of people actually taking the best deal on offer, and far fewer falling for the designed in psychological trickery designed to pay for the deal that lures the customers in.

No doubt this happened here, savvy expert race punters discussed how one might go about maximising the net win from such a deal, whereas the bookie expected most people to place their bets at random believing horse racing to largely be a random event. Occasional punters often do bet on a horse in a big race "because they like the name", whereas the savvy punter would say that favourites are favourites because they are expected to win more often than not, so the best strategy for such an offer would be to use the paid for bets and the free bets on the favourites for a small net win on balance of probability. Unfortunately for the bookies, this became a large net win due to the favourites dominating, far to large to be offset from the money won from punters using the "because I liked the name" method of placing bets.

The reason to think twice before NOT depositing at this lot is that they are likely to seek to renege on bets the next time their marketing department screws up, and reneging on bets is just not the done thing, it's been a matter of honour for much longer than the law has recognised gambling debts as legally enforceable (which is the same law that will help UK punters caught up in this).

A message also needs to be sent to other bookies who are tempted to renege on bets when their marketing department screws up, and this lot suffering severely from the fall out will send that message, and the worse they suffer, the better that message to others will be.

In years gone by, the company HOOVER found themselves in a similar situation having run a stupid marketing promo designed to shift some old stock gathering dust in their warehouse. They offered free flights to anyone who bought one of these products, but the value of the flights was greater than the cost of the product! Nevertheless, they decided it was wise to proceed because they thought most free flights would go unclaimed as they were off-season seats bulk bought from operators at a knock down rate. What ACTUALLY happened, and long before we had the internet and forums like MSE, was that customers bought cheap flights with a free vacuum cleaner thrown in, and many even threw away the vacuum because they were ONLY interested in the flights as the total cost of the vacuum was less than even the cheapest off-season flights that could be bought from the travel agent shop. People were then prepared to be very flexible, and they would choose their holiday based on what destinations and dates were available, hence almost all the free flights were claimed. Unfortunately, HOOVER had not actually bought enough packages for the number of appliances they had included in the offer, and they tried to renege on the deal, but customer and regulatory pressure forced them to stick to what they had agreed, and as a result HOOVER went bust, but nearly everyone who wanted them got their free flights.

Funnily enough, many marketing departments have NOT managed to learn from this, and the same mistakes are made again and again, often for the same reasons, the pursuit of numbers, rather than the quality of the deal for the company. HOOVER should have realised that there was a good reason for all the excess stock, people didn't need another vacuum cleaner, and whatever deal they came up with would not change that. A holiday however is something that everyone looks to have, and the cheaper the better, so people WILL go for a very cheap deal on a holiday if otherwise they would have gone without. For HOOVER, it would have been cheaper for them to have stuck all these surplus appliances in a big warehouse, and took out newspaper ads "come along to XXXXXX and help yourself to free vacuum cleaners at xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx - first come, first served, available till they are all gone".

For TLCbet, they should have focussed on getting quality customers, not numbers. They should have allowed only one free bet per person no matter how many of the 4 portals they signed up to, or better still, perhaps only a refund of one losing bet, or some similar deal based on the punter being unlucky. They could also have made it a free bet on, say, the Grand National, making punters have to wait a bit and of course remain a member for a while rather being able to "win, cut, & run" during Cheltenham week. The nature of the Grand National makes it a race where randomness plays a large part in the outcome, and often favourites are taken out of the race by being brought down in the general melee at some of the harder jumps. This also makes it a good race for running a free bet promotion, it's harder for the savvy punter to turn a regular profit.

Had this been a Cheltenham with few winning favourites, would TLCbet still be claiming "abuse" and "fraud", or would they still be proudly proclaiming that they were all "independent bookies" and it was "OK to have accounts at all four for the Grand National or the Derby".
 
This is mainly bookmaker related but as they have casino's too thought a heads up might be worth posting.

Many news stories about these banning players for apparent bonus abuse today, a few linked below, to show its not just one or 2 disgruntled customers.

For what its worth, I've spoken to TLC bet live chat today and been lied to time and time again, given wrong advice, and they refused to let me see the terms and conditions saying they had been removed and they couldn't access them any more! Fun88 have removed live chat from the website.

I hope people think twice before depositing with these, at least until they explain whats going on, I wouldn't like to see anyone else lose money.

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If they didnt paid u and ask them.give u the evidence if they didnt give just directly go to their license complaint his issued
 

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