As for the relationship between Moneybookers and Betfair, I had an informative chat with some Moneybookers VIP personnel last summer and they told me that Betfair is by far their biggest customer. Whereas smaller joints pay 2% - 4% to Moneybookers for every player's deposit or withdrawal, Betfair only has to pay around 1% because if it's enormous volume. Moneybookers would never risk losing their biggest customer which leads me to believe that they are always going to do whatever Betfair demands them to do. I am not sure if this confiscation would have happened if it was some other entity with less power than Betfair.
This is corruption. Charging less is fine, but caving in to demands without going through due process just because a big merchant throws their weight around is just as corrupt as slipping a bribe to an official in order to get your issue expedited.
Advantage play is simply a player seeking to win, rather than have fun losing. Betfair also "advantage play" when they use marketing and psychological trickery to manipulate customers into believing a deal is far better than it is. Many businesses do this, and many overstep the boundaries and get sanctioned by the ASA. Betfair have a number of sanctions from the ASA, but rather than mend they ways, they do things a little different in order to sidestep the intent (or if you like, the "spirit") of the rules, which was to prevent businesses misrepresenting their services to consumers. If the industry can do it, I don't see why clever players should feel ashamed of beating the industry at their own game.
What is particularly bad about this case is the retrospective nature of the action, which is why it had to be done via a "chargeback". When a player decides to deal with a dispute via a chargeback, they are automatically demonised and classed as a fraud, even if the casino has blatantly ripped them off, and they have an unarguable legal right to ask their card issuer for the return of their money. It should be the same for a casino, if they charge back from a players' personal account, be it bank or eWallet, they should also be demonised whatever the circumstances.
It seems this distinction between being a bank and an "eMoney issuer" is FAR more significant than players think, and in particular strips the player of many of the consumer and legal rights they take for granted, such as a fair and unbiased dispute process.
In this case, Moneybookers simply took the money back because Betfair said so, yet when KK was clearly defrauded via his Moneybookers account being hacked, he was told there was no way to retrieve his money because it had disappeared into a merchant account. This is hardly an unbiased process.
Betfair should have been told the same, the OP had already moved the money to his bank, so it should have been too late for Betfair to ask for it back.
I don't believe Betfair even had to state a case, let alone give Moneybookers evidence. This was discovered quite some time ago when a casino charged back a payment from a Neteller account 14 days after it was paid in because they decided the player had violated the "spirit of the bonus". The same argument was raised, that the casino had to have lied to Neteller, but in this case the rep DID engage, and said that all they had to do was ask Neteller to reverse the payment, and they did, there was no need to say why, thus no need to lie.
Of course the rep was "crucified" and quickly apologised and gave the money back to the player, but at this point we all learned that such things COULD be done, and astonishingly easily.
It also seems that Moneybookers lied to the OP by implying it was an unspecified breach of Moneybookers terms, when it was really a case of them bowing to the demands of their biggest merchant, a procedure you will NOT see outlined in the terms and conditions.
I expect this is covered in the merchant agreement, which is why non merchants are not even allowed to know the merchant account terms and conditions, and only get to see them after they have been approved as a merchant, and need to agree to them.
Whilst the OP may have a weak case over what was done during play, any court claim could be about the procedure used to recover the money, rather than the reason why. Unfortunately "spirit of" has no place in a court, and unless evidence is supplied of a specific breach of the terms, even the reason behind the action will not stand up.
Unless what the OP did constituted fraud, Betfair don't really have a case. Even a breach of terms and conditions does not justify what Betfair did, they should have taken civil proceedings to recover damages.
The ASA have already determined that Betfair had no case over the "happy hour" fiasco, but it is a shame their powers are limited to ordering that the breach not be repeated.
Moneybookers also risk losing players over the publicity surrounding this issue, as it makes it very clear that money is not really "yours" even when in your own eWallet account, and can be recalled at any time by the casino that paid it in.
The industry will also suffer because players will feel more justified in using their power of chargeback to resolve a dispute with a casino, rather than using mediation. It seems that PLAYERS have a similar power when they use the chargeback system to get their losses back because the system itself is biased AGAINST casinos, that operate at best in a "grey area" when it comes to card deposits, and so are unlikely to avail themselves of the opportunity the system grants them as merchants to put their side forward, thus the banks issue the "chargeback" by default because of a "no show" by the merchant. This is also why online casinos suffer so heavily from chargeback fraud, despite the system having been designed to strike a fair balance between customer and merchant.
What the OP did appears to be the equivalent of "card counting", turning a -EV game into a +EV opportunity. B & M casinos can ban a player from "card counting", but they CANNOT go into their bank accounts and take back monies paid out from previous visits, nor even take money from them after they leave. Even where blatant cheating is involved, they have to take the player to court, as happened with the team that used electronic wizardry to beat Roulette in a UK casino, and where the casino failed to prove that they had sufficient grounds to ask for the return of winnings already paid out from previous visits.
Yes, Markus and I exchanged a few PMs where he told me the whole story. I contacted him first because I was interested in what had happened. So given what I know I thought it was best to stay out of this thread because I wanted to leave it up to Markus to decide how much information he wants to reveal.
