[Triple_D_Bet]

Trip, why do you continue to defend this guy? If he had any degree of intelligence, he wouldn't have made such a stupid so called "mistake" in the first place. Why even take the chance of doing it, knowing what the consequences would be? Centaur is not going to admit to it, but he was up to something, testing to waters just to see what options might be available if he was able to get away with his vpn scam.

Again, Count one. The proof is abundantly verifiable that he let his ip address reflect that he was in Canada and thus was listed as a competitor on the Canadian team. Two, he "allowed" his little fiasco to continue on, for the purpose of his own amusement and to "rile" fellow posters. And three, mr. centaur fart, decided to place an sbr order using, yet again, a fictitious vpn ip address. This time claiming "whoops" I forgot I "purposely" logged on to a Canadian vpn and place an sbr order.

Trying to put the blame on SBR's customer service is an irrelevant argument, Trip. The customer service here has been nothing short of outstanding. I even got a phone call from the Sam the man himself when I placed my very first order, just to make sure I received it ok. Yeah, it was just for a single pizza, but it was back in the day before electronic gift cards and I thought is was pretty damn cool that Sam would call and verify the pizza order made it to my home.

I like to think I'm an intelligent guy who also happens to use a VPN for work, and I've messed it up plenty of times...it's a lot more likely than you might think, pretty easy to forget what network you're on.

Hearing people bitch about centy playing for Team Canada was the most entertaining thing the world cup had going for it, probably for the entire ridiculous duration of it. However, his store access wasn't removed until much later, so counts 1 and 2 have no bearing on the issue at hand. As for count 3...while it's conceivable he could have been "testing the waters" to see if SBR monitored IPs vs store orders, it seems like a pretty dumb thing to do deliberately. Let's go through both reasonable outcomes:

1) SBR ships to him based on his previous US mailing address and residency: in this scenario, he gets his gift cards (like any other US poster) but gains no information that would help him access other items in the store.

2) SBR denies his order based on the Canadian IP: in this scenario, he'd confirm what everyone knew from the world cup standings (that SBR knows what your IP address is) and that they compare it against your country for store purchases (again, duh). This still doesn't tell him if an order for sportsbook cash would be approved.

In neither case does he get any new information or gain an advantage....so why would he run such a worthless "test"? He either tried to set up a scam by running a pointless test, or he forgot to disconnect from his VPN...in my experience one of those is several orders of magnitude more likely than the other.

SBR's customer service has always been rock-solid for me too, but they screwed up on this one (based on what we know). It's crystal clear he wasn't in the wrong here (US poster ordering US items), and SBR should have notified him, maybe even cancelled the order and asked him to resubmit. Was there other stuff going on, like centy being a smartass in chat with whomever? Maybe, but barring bomb threats or mailing anthrax-riden letters to costa rica, being a smartass shouldn't cause you to forfeit hundreds of dollars and all future value for your paid membership.

The fact that SBR doesn't see the need to explain themselves (beyond a cryptic "he knows what he did" and giving away points to people who would badmouth him) speaks loudly to their customer service; namely, that if abnormal situations arise, they don't give two shits about a paying member and may arbitrarily kick him to the curb. If you catch a guy trying to scam, then sure boot him...but SBR comes off here as just takign a cheap shot to not have to pay out on some points