I called Matchbook on Tuesday to ask about my payout request. The clerk I spoke to stated that they will get to it as soon as they get their money from their Neteller merchant account.
I then asked him, since I’ve seen no reports of anyone successfully getting their money from WSEX/Matchbook since Neteller pulled out on January 17, “Can you clarify that for me? Are you sending out payouts currently, but have fallen behind due to the volume? Or have you suspended payouts entirely?”
“That’s correct. There are no payouts going out at this time.”
“And you’re saying that’s because Neteller is holding the money you need to be able to pay us?”
“Yes.”
“So we don’t get paid unless Neteller pays you?”
“Oh, no. We didn’t put all our eggs in just that one basket. We’re expecting money from other sources shortly. Our hope is to be able to resume payouts some time next week, with or without the Neteller money.”
To me, this doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. I can’t believe they’re broke and are scrambling around to scrape together some money to pay people (though it would be consistent with their coming up with yet another bonus offer this week to encourage deposits).
I would think, instead, that they’re flush with cash. Number one, they just had a much more generous than usual bonus promotion in an effort to get the money Americans involuntarily had to withdraw from Pinnacle. It was 20% cash, up to $2,000 on a $10,000 deposit; they usually have vastly lower caps on their bonuses. I and no doubt many others put in the full $10,000, and since that was so recent I have to think not many have already played $60,000 to meet the rollover and are trying to withdraw.
Plus they’ve always insisted they keep more than 100% of player funds; Jay in fact likes to point out that any book that doesn’t is technically insolvent.
And if they were short, I would think that would mean that they would gradually run out of funds as they filled the higher than usual payout requests since January 17. But, like Neteller, it appears they stopped paying entirely when this all started.
So unless they started with zero—which they didn’t—it can’t be a matter of they have no money to pay anyone with.
So why then the alarming absence of reports of successful payouts from WSEX/Matchbook during this time? Is it that they’re being blocked from paying by all the obstacles that have popped up? Well, at first there’s some plausibility to that, but how then are other books paying? I know some are paying with delays, and some are putting various restrictions on those payouts, but we’re still seeing reports of payouts from almost every other name book since January 17, including Greek, CRIS, Bodog, etc.
WSEX/Matchbook is incapable of doing something that Greek, CRIS, Bodog, etc. (not to mention Royal, SIA, Betus and the like, for pete’s sake) have found a way to do?
And even assuming there is some legitimate reason they have not been able to pay, why—as I’ve read in the forums and been told by several people—have they during this time been frequently telling their customers things like “Oh, your payout is in the batch that’s going out tomorrow”?
This is exactly the behavior I expected from C and D books under pressure circumstances—stop paying, and tell your customers false or evasive things about it. It makes no sense to me at all that this is the behavior we’re getting from WSEX/Matchbook.
Because it doesn’t compute to me, I still assume funds are safe and everyone will eventually be paid, and I’m not in anything like the panic I would be if I had the same amount of money in a mediocre book and could find no reports of payouts from them in the forum in the last two weeks. I keep telling myself, “Yeah, but this is WSEX. You’ll be fine.” But there’s a limit to how long I’ll retain such confidence.
How about an explanation? How about better communication with your customers? Best of all, how about paying?
I then asked him, since I’ve seen no reports of anyone successfully getting their money from WSEX/Matchbook since Neteller pulled out on January 17, “Can you clarify that for me? Are you sending out payouts currently, but have fallen behind due to the volume? Or have you suspended payouts entirely?”
“That’s correct. There are no payouts going out at this time.”
“And you’re saying that’s because Neteller is holding the money you need to be able to pay us?”
“Yes.”
“So we don’t get paid unless Neteller pays you?”
“Oh, no. We didn’t put all our eggs in just that one basket. We’re expecting money from other sources shortly. Our hope is to be able to resume payouts some time next week, with or without the Neteller money.”
To me, this doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. I can’t believe they’re broke and are scrambling around to scrape together some money to pay people (though it would be consistent with their coming up with yet another bonus offer this week to encourage deposits).
I would think, instead, that they’re flush with cash. Number one, they just had a much more generous than usual bonus promotion in an effort to get the money Americans involuntarily had to withdraw from Pinnacle. It was 20% cash, up to $2,000 on a $10,000 deposit; they usually have vastly lower caps on their bonuses. I and no doubt many others put in the full $10,000, and since that was so recent I have to think not many have already played $60,000 to meet the rollover and are trying to withdraw.
Plus they’ve always insisted they keep more than 100% of player funds; Jay in fact likes to point out that any book that doesn’t is technically insolvent.
And if they were short, I would think that would mean that they would gradually run out of funds as they filled the higher than usual payout requests since January 17. But, like Neteller, it appears they stopped paying entirely when this all started.
So unless they started with zero—which they didn’t—it can’t be a matter of they have no money to pay anyone with.
So why then the alarming absence of reports of successful payouts from WSEX/Matchbook during this time? Is it that they’re being blocked from paying by all the obstacles that have popped up? Well, at first there’s some plausibility to that, but how then are other books paying? I know some are paying with delays, and some are putting various restrictions on those payouts, but we’re still seeing reports of payouts from almost every other name book since January 17, including Greek, CRIS, Bodog, etc.
WSEX/Matchbook is incapable of doing something that Greek, CRIS, Bodog, etc. (not to mention Royal, SIA, Betus and the like, for pete’s sake) have found a way to do?
And even assuming there is some legitimate reason they have not been able to pay, why—as I’ve read in the forums and been told by several people—have they during this time been frequently telling their customers things like “Oh, your payout is in the batch that’s going out tomorrow”?
This is exactly the behavior I expected from C and D books under pressure circumstances—stop paying, and tell your customers false or evasive things about it. It makes no sense to me at all that this is the behavior we’re getting from WSEX/Matchbook.
Because it doesn’t compute to me, I still assume funds are safe and everyone will eventually be paid, and I’m not in anything like the panic I would be if I had the same amount of money in a mediocre book and could find no reports of payouts from them in the forum in the last two weeks. I keep telling myself, “Yeah, but this is WSEX. You’ll be fine.” But there’s a limit to how long I’ll retain such confidence.
How about an explanation? How about better communication with your customers? Best of all, how about paying?
