Losers welcome here. Winners? Not so much.
In the U.K. it’s called “stake factoring,” a sort of grading system designed to minimize how much winning players bet and maximize how much losing players bet. The goal is to increase profitability by squeezing successful punters. Winning players have their maximum bets lowered; losers have theirs raised.
For example, new patrons likely receive a stake factor of 1, allowing them to bet 100 percent of the maximum stake, say £500 (US$667).
“As soon as people start winning or losing, that gets adjusted,” said a source identified as Cameron, formerly of William Hill. “It starts with 50 percent and if they keep beating the bookie, it’ll keep going down. At William Hill it went down to 25 percent to 10 percent and eventually down to 1 percent.”
Sometimes decisions were based on a player’s job or friends on Facebook.
“It’s particularly true of any account with a female name,” said an odds trader. The rationale was that a male bettor who had his stake factor slashed would pose as a spouse or sister.
A Paddy Power manual seen by The Guardian, recommends restriction of customers who “look like bad business” and to increase stake factors for “customers who usually reach their maximum bet.
Bookies see stake factoring as a legitimate way of levelling the field against bettors who use unfair methods. Like latency cheats who take advantage of the small delay between what is on TV and what is on the field. Or a stable hand with inside info on a lame horse.
Then there are the arbers, or arbitrage gamblers. These folks sift through websites in search of wrong odds. Arbers place bets going both ways and win no matter what.
However, some traders fear that bookies have become trigger-happy.
“It tends to happen now that everyone that beats the price gets put under the ‘arber’ banner, which is unfair,” said Fintan, who has worked at multiple operators including Ladbrokes.
Paddy Power said safer gambling checks would always override stake-factoring decisions.
But Brian Chappell, founder of Justice for Punters, said he did not trust the industry to do right by its customers and feared unintended consequences.
“Following intrusive, secretive profiling, only losing customers are allowed to choose how much they bet,” he said. “This is facilitating an unsafe and unfair U.K. sports betting market where unprofitable customers are more likely to consider the black market.”
In other U.K. news, BetVictor has been slapped with a £2 million regulatory action by the Gambling Commission after an investigation revealed failures in social responsibility and money laundering. The fine will be paid to the National Strategy to Reduce Gambling Harms.
The Gambling Commission began a regulatory review of BetVictor Gaming after a compliance assessment in April 2020. The company failed with programs designed to prevent money laundering and protect vulnerable people. Money-laundering rule breaches included inadequate risk factors, such as high spenders or consumers using multiple gambling accounts or wallets, according to the Racing Post.
A lack of effective evidence for due diligence in the majority of accounts allowed customers to deposit and spend large sums of money before the source and affordability were determined.
Gambling Commission director of enforcement Leanne Oxley said: “As a gambling regulator our focus is on ensuring that gambling in Britain is fair, safe and crime-free, and BetVictor failed consumers by breaching rules aimed at achieving these objectives.
