Third-party betting case raises familiar questions

Court case in Essex has gambling industry under scrutiny again as punter says: ‘It was only when I won that they did any checks’


Talking Horses: third-party betting case raises familiar questions
Court case in Essex has gambling industry under scrutiny again as punter says: ‘It was only when I won that they did any checks’

Greg Wood
Greg Wood
@Greg_Wood_
Wed 19 Jul 2023 08.00 BST
In the never-ending struggle between punters and bookmakers, no one can be in any doubt that the bookies will always have the upper hand and the growth of online gambling over the past 20 years has only exaggerated the imbalance of power.

Backers who turn a profit on their betting can expect to have their accounts closed or restricted to betting in pennies as a matter of routine. Even a few losing bets that beat the starting price can be enough to get an account flagged as potentially “unprofitable”.

And when all else fails, there may well be something in the extensive terms and conditions (T&Cs) that 99% of punters sign up to without reading that will come to the bookie’s aid.

The gambling business, in other words, generally holds all the aces, with another up their sleeve just in case, but until quite recently, the worst that a punter could expect for a breach of the T&Cs was account closure, with any balance (including their initial stake) retained by the bookmaker. That, however, may no longer be the case.

David (not his real name) is a former Bet365 customer and his breach of the T&Cs was “third-party betting”. He used the bank details of around a dozen friends, acquaintances and family members – with their knowledge – to sign up for accounts with Bet365 and take advantage of the bonuses and offers that all firms dangle – for new customers only – as carrots to keep their client lists growing.

Third-party betting is a breach of the T&Cs of all online gambling firms. It is also an extremely common practice, not least because shrewd punters, the actual or potential winners whose bets eat into the bookies’ profit margin, often cannot get a bet accepted any other way. Other punters simply look to bank the “free” bonus, or use free bets to lock in profits elsewhere via the practice known as “matched betting”.

David recently went on trial in Essex, charged with “fraud by false representation against an online betting company ‘bet365’ and thereafter laundering the proceeds of said fraud(s)”. After the judge in the case made it plain that he would face a two-year prison term if found guilty at the conclusion of a full trial, he changed his plea to guilty, receiving a sentence of 23 months in prison, suspended for two years, with 180 hours of unpaid work, and a confiscation order for nearly £270,000 – the total amount withdrawn from the 15 accounts which he operated. He also, of course, now has a criminal record.

Unlike the winning punters that firms such as Bet365 are so keen to avoid, however, David was, overall, a long-term loser with the firm. By his own admission, he was also in the grip of a gambling addiction when the accounts were in operation, and insists that the £270,000 withdrawn from Bet365 represents an overall loss of about £70,000 during his time betting with the firm.

“I’d always had gambling issues and it turned into an illness,” he says. “I was managing friends and family accounts, which goes on literally all over the place and I wasn’t as heavily into it as a lot of people. The total bonus value I took over six years was about £3,000, but I was also down £70,000 on sports betting and stuff. Every single account was down.

“Sometimes I was depositing 20 times a day, but there were never any checks [on whether he might have a gambling problem]. If what I did was a crime, I think that Bet365 was aiding and abetting me.”

David also believes that Bet365’s security systems could have used internet cookies and the IP address of his computer – a known practice employed by gambling firms – to link the 15 accounts to a single individual, but kept taking deposits while the accounts continued to lose.

Then, however, he hit a run of luck and the balance on one account rose to nearly £30,000.

“It was only when I won that they did any checks,” he says. “They let me keep depositing and losing with linked accounts until it wasn’t in their favour. They locked the account and I wasn’t letting it go and it all escalated from there.”

David took a decision that, in hindsight, he deeply regrets. “That was my biggest win in gambling and I knew that I was down so much over the years,” he says. “I couldn’t understand why they wouldn’t just pay and close the account and so I lodged a civil claim for the money in the county court.” The account was in the name of an acquaintance, and when they did not appear at the hearing, the case was thrown out, with an order of costs against the “claimant” of more than £100,000.

David is considering whether to take civil action against Bet365 for what he sees as its possible negligence in his case and could enlist the help of Andrew Montague, the solicitor who successfully helped the late Barney Curley to retrieve his winnings from a major coup a decade ago, in pursuing it. Montague also represented Megan McCann, a 20-year-old student claimed winnings of around £1m from Bet365 in 2016 in a case that was subsequently settled out of court.

Bet365 has been approached for comment.