Does life suck: minors can bet, but cannot withdraw?
If you were looking at EPL match analysis and tips, chances are you stumbled upon Cheeky Punter site.
Apart from the picks, his site features rich league tables, perfect for stats junkies like me, a betting blog and plethora of affiliate links, primarily to Bet365.
Guy behind that interesting blog, ranked at about ~500k at Alexa at the time of writing this post, seems to have a wit for what goes on in world’s allegedly top league, and what you can regularly find there are nothing less than winning picks at odds rarely shorter than 3.00, while winning combos at odds ~10.00 are also not a rare breed as well.
Oh, yes, and a pop over add, or whatever it’s called by SEO experts, you know, that annoying window that suddenly pops up and screams at you to subscribe to newsletters, regardless if you already did it a while ago or not, and then another one when you attempt to scroll down the page – if you have not already left the page, that is…
The best part is that it’s all free, altogether with adds, and the picks are more profitable than majority of paid tipping services I had a chance to see or test.
And it’s Bet365 that actually triggered this post. Blog author published yesterday (21. March 2017) a blog post, titled Bet365 Bad Reviews & Negative Comments. I found myself disagreeing with a paragraph of that post, and accordingly posted a comment to that post, but few hours later I get back to the post just to find my comment deleted. So, I’ll vent up my opinion here; not that it will change anything.
He (Cheeky Punter) noticed that Bet365 online reviews totally contradict his own Bet365 review, so he decided to defend them. He identified and addressed five main points that negative reviews of Bet365 seem to focus on.
First point of complaints was ID Provision & Account Verification. Defending Bet365, Cheeky Punter claims:
[…]they let you deposit and spend your money but then they why do they want ID to make a withdrawal?
The reason you are required to do this is in order to:
Prevent minors from illegally accessing their services.
Guard against their sites being used for money laundering.
While I have no clue about second item in this list, the first one is certainly utter nonsense.
If Bet365 – or any other bookmaker, for that matter – indeed cares about minors, they need to ask for ID Provision & Account Verification in the very beginning, at the moment of registration, before accepting any deposit. Only that way you can be sure minors will be protected and not use your services!
How many customers do make it to the withdrawal? I suspect more than 3 or 4 out of 10 customers are skilled or lucky enough to increase their deposit to the point of withdrawal. If we talk about minors, I believe it’s even less – minors are inexperienced, do not research betting markets and chase losses, so I doubt more than 1 out of 10 reaches point where (s)he needs to provide ID and verify the account in order to withdraw the money.
So what about remaining 60% of all customers, or 90% of minors who (are allowed by Bet365 to illegally register, deposit money and gamble, and) never make it to withdrawal, why does Bet365 not protect them?
May it be because Bet365, as well as any other bookmaker, lives off of such a customers, so it absolutely does not pay off to care about them as long as they don’t try to withdraw what they believe is theirs, it would be a financial suicide preventing people from depositing money when you know majority of them will never take it back.
But once a bettor manages to get money flowing in the opposite way, from bet365 towards their accounts, that’s when the obstacle arise… errrrm, no, that much money is not good for minors, let’s ask them for ID Provision & Account Verification, and if they cannot provide it, that means they (were allowed by Bet365 to) illegally registered hence no money for them!
Plain hipocrisy of Bet365 to act so, and plain hipocrisy of Cheeky Punter to defend such an act! Yes, I know all bookmakers do it, but please don’t pretend they do it to protect minors, when it’s obvious they do it to earn money, bookmakers from losing bettors, bloggers from affiliate links.
What are your thoughts on this issue, do you think Bet365 is right or wrong the way they set it up? Let us know in the comments below.
