Former Australian online sportsbook BetEasy certainly lived up to its name, but not in a good way. The site, now part of Sportsbet, was fined by the Northern Territory Racing Commission for allowing a self-excluded problem gambler to not just create an account, but lose over half a million dollars.
The case is a few years old, but only now has the Commission finished and published its report. The unnamed gambler had previously self-excluded from CrownBet, from which BetEasy had been spun off. As such, BetEasy and its affiliates had a record of the person’s self-excluded status.
A BetEasy affiliate named John Dow, however, took it upon himself in January 2019 to reach out to the gambler to get him to start betting again. Dow helped him create a new account in his wife’s name – how nice of him – and continued to “facilitate” the account, including providing free bets. Wow, what customer service!
But BetEasy was on top of things. Employees noticed that the address connected to the new account was the same as one on an excluded account. Great, so of course they banned this account and all was well.
Five days later, the company conducted a check on the gambler’s identity and, according to the report, found that some of the answers provided to BetEasy’s questions were incorrect. Right, so now the account is flagged and banned, right? Not so fast, my friend. The check apparently “satisfied BetEasy that the account holder’s identity was verified.” Oh, ok. Makes me feel confident for when my son tries to buy a bunch of in-game items on his phone.
The gambler then proceeded to rack up AU$719,350 (US$540,811) in betting losses. He and his wife tried to get BetEasy to pay them back; the two parties came to a settlement this April, the day before the Commission took up the case. Financial details of the settlement were not made public.
The Commission fined BetEasy AU$26,860 (US$20,193) for each of two licensing condition breaches. One violation was of the Code of Practice for Responsible Online Gambling “multiple” times. In the other, the Commission said the company did not have the proper processes in place to “identify and act on indicators of problem gambling.”
The Commission believes there may have been a third violation for not have procedures in place to identify customers and prevent the “circumvention” of its systems, but did not fine the company for that.
BetEasy tried to pass off all responsibility to the affiliate, John Dow, but the Commission wasn’t buying it. The affiliate and BetEasy communicated about the account and the company should have acted on obvious red flags.
