Party Poker Admin Charges - Outrageous!

rowmare

Dormant account
Joined
Sep 25, 2003
Location
Vancouver Island
A player forwarded the email quoted below to me.

Dear XXXXXXX,
Our records show that that you have not logged in to your account for 180 days.

A$$5 administration fee* has been charged to your inactive account. The next charge will be deducted from you account balance on: 13-Jul-2006.

However, this fee will NOT be charged if your account, or any related account, is reactivated on or before 12-Jul-2006.

Reactivating your account is easy: Just log in and place a cash wager, enter a tournament with a cash entry fee, or play a raked hand.

*TERMS & CONDITIONS If you do not access your Account by "logging on" to your Account using your Account name and password for any period of 180 days, then after those 180 days (the "180 day grace period") your Account (and any related account with any ESP) will be deemed "Inactive". If your Account becomes Inactive, then the Company is entitled to charge you an administrative fee (the "Inactive Account Fee"). The Inactive Account Fee shall be deducted from your Account Balance at the end of each calendar month in accordance with the Inactive Account Fee Schedule. We will stop deducting the Inactive Account Fee from your Account Balance if your Account is re-activated.

If you have any questions or concerns, please don't hesitate to contact us. Our Customer Care team is available 24/7.

Sincerely,

Party Team

info@partyaccount.com
 
bpb said:
Please explain why this is outrageous.

Personally, considering Party is probably getting interest off the money in the account, I think it's absurd to charge a user for the privilige of leaving their money in a non-interest account. If there's no activity in the account, there's at most a record sitting on a database somewhere. It doesn't cost them $5 to keep the record.

Was there any advanced notice that the amount would be charged, or was this the first notification?
 
paul02085 said:
There are banks in the US who do this same thing. Not a big issue to me.

But doesnt a bank also give you interest, a cheque book, offer direct debits, give you debit/credit cards, have branches you can visit, offer you financial facilities, offer cashpoints, etc etc.

A credit card company can offer you credit when you have none, can pay bills in a million places, send you monthly statements, offer insurance against any fraud on your card anywhere in the world, offer insurance if you buy faulty goods with the card, etc etc.

In contrast where would the casinos costs come from?

Or would you have no problem with any company you have an online account with charging you for, erm, having an account with them?

Sorry for being blunt but it seems a bit sheepsish to not question what you are actually paying for.
 
Sure banks do this, but only after you open an account, sign legal documents telling, in which you are informed about the service charges.
 
Two reasons I like the casino is doing this. First lets use as an example 1k what if an employee of the casino notices the idle account and enters the account from a home computer and withdrawals the funds. Remember they were an employee and had access to account information. Secondly, if account balance is at zero it is a lot easier for the casino to drop in a blanket bonus to zero balance accounts. Thirdly, thought of another, saves headaches down the road if the player says that policys or rules have changed since the funds were deposited and want what those terms were. If a player doesn't know the money is there and does not respond when the casino tells them, than those funds are not really as important as they seem to the player.
 
phynqster said:
Two reasons I like the casino is doing this. First lets use as an example 1k what if an employee of the casino notices the idle account and enters the account from a home computer and withdrawals the funds. Remember they were an employee and had access to account information. Secondly, if account balance is at zero it is a lot easier for the casino to drop in a blanket bonus to zero balance accounts. Thirdly, thought of another, saves headaches down the road if the player says that policys or rules have changed since the funds were deposited and want what those terms were. If a player doesn't know the money is there and does not respond when the casino tells them, than those funds are not really as important as they seem to the player.

What he said.:)
 
Hmmmm, I guess that makes sense, but I can think of other ways to encourage a depositor to pee or get off the pot.

An employee cannot access any player accounts from their home computer - they don't have the passwords. I expect that all passwords are encrypted in the database. If they are so transparent that they could be accessed, then that's definitely something that needs to be changed.

I once worked for MSN, and nobody at MSN could access passwords. If somebody lost their password, all we could do is reset it for them and advise them to change the new password after they logged in.

At least they send out a monthly email to let the account holder know the money has been charged, therefore giving said account holder plenty of time to withdraw the balance before the next month's charges.

It still seems outrageous to me that there is a fee on inactive accounts. Do any online casinos do this, or other poker rooms? I don't know, since I never leave any money in my inactive online accounts.
 
I have seen a number of diferent casinos backends where their passwords were not encrypted. Some of these places did allow employees access to the password data base. Also it does not take much hinting if you are an employee and you get the password of a player, to realize this player probably uses the same password on accounts at a number of different casinos, and the same player id.
 
yes other casinos do charge.

I was pleasantly surprised to find i had like $300 sitting in an old intercasino account I no longer used and if they hadn't sent me the notice they were charging me $5, I'd never have remembered the money was in there.

... I'm guessing the money was a comp payment that I didn't know or remember was coming to me because that's a little bit more than I usually would forget about.

:)
 
henryVIII said:
Please explain why cash-laden dormant accounts are a bad thing for a casino?

Bet you can't.
It takes up memory on the server to store the player balances, maybe as much as 8 bytes per player. For a million players, we are talking several megabytes, which might costs as much as a few cents. An operation of the size of PartyPoker clearly cannot afford this sort of expenses.
 
When Party Poker was a startup and wanted new players/deposits Party used to pay the players an automatic %10 ?? interest payment added to the account monthly.
This was quite a awhile ago, I can not remember the exact percentage, but think it was 10%. If there was a raked hand requirement on the monthly interest payment, it was small.
Below is a copy of an old cashier history proving these monthly interest payments.
04-JUN-04 05:16 Cashout $800.00 9674301 Db SUCCESS
01-JUN-04 08:31 Interest MAY, 04 $7.43 9563538 Cr SUCCESS
01-MAY-04 13:19 Interest APR, 04 $6.65 8281825 Cr SUCCESS
01-APR-04 07:20 Interest MAR, 04 $8.65 6812153 Cr SUCCESS
19-MAR-04 11:29 Cashout $279.07 6354192 Db SUCCESS
01-MAR-04 08:32 Interest FEB, 04 $8.13 5724058 Cr SUCCESS
01-FEB-04 11:14 Interest JAN, 04 $8.36 4769487 Cr SUCCESS

REOdeathwagon
 
REOdeathwagon said:
When Party Poker was a startup and wanted new players/deposits Party used to pay the players an automatic %10 ?? interest payment added to the account monthly.
This was quite a awhile ago, I can not remember the exact percentage, but think it was 10%. If there was a raked hand requirement on the monthly interest payment, it was small.
Below is a copy of an old cashier history proving these monthly interest payments.
04-JUN-04 05:16 Cashout $800.00 9674301 Db SUCCESS
01-JUN-04 08:31 Interest MAY, 04 $7.43 9563538 Cr SUCCESS
01-MAY-04 13:19 Interest APR, 04 $6.65 8281825 Cr SUCCESS
01-APR-04 07:20 Interest MAR, 04 $8.65 6812153 Cr SUCCESS
19-MAR-04 11:29 Cashout $279.07 6354192 Db SUCCESS
01-MAR-04 08:32 Interest FEB, 04 $8.13 5724058 Cr SUCCESS
01-FEB-04 11:14 Interest JAN, 04 $8.36 4769487 Cr SUCCESS

REOdeathwagon

Yes, but now that Party is huge and profits $300,000,000ish per year, they believe they can do whatever they want to their customers, and if crap like this continues, they'll keep doing it. It's like Scott Adams' slogan for people who work in marketing: "You're not screwing the customer. All you're doing is holding him down while the salespeople screw him."
 

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