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".