Luke M vs. WagerWeb opinion

[Ganchrow]

How do you run these checks? Real-time as the bets come in? Once a day, checking all bets?

I was envisioning running it every night. But real time would work just fine as well.

You still have an X^2 function as your past bet dataset grows. This is an extra problem for fraud prevention that books don't want to deal with.

It's not even close to quadratic in past history. Worst case scenario it would be linear in the daily bets. What a hash table does is provide a lookup mechanism such that in general (with some technical exceptions) the average time for a lookup is independent of the number of items stored. So whether you have a hash table of 10 IP address or 10,000,000, the average time taken to locate a given item will be on average, exactly the same.

To give you an example, using a Perl one-liner on my 3Ghz home PC with 2GB RAM, building a hash table in memory from scratch with 3,000,000 randomly created IP addresses (which is probably 100x more than the number of IP addresses a book would have) takes me about 11 seconds. Searching the table for a 1.1 million different IPs (each of which has a 90% chance of being in the list) takes about 3 seconds.

Building a hash table in memory from scratch with 6,000,000 randomly created IP addresses takes me about 22 seconds. Searching the table for a 1.1 million different IPs (each of which has a 90% chance of being in the list) takes the same 3 seconds.

Also remember that each IP would map to many many bets. Even if a book had 2,000,000 bets in a day it wouldn't mean that that's how many IP addresses it would have. The number of IP addresses would be far, far fewer. Furthermore, each IP address should realistically only be locked in to a certain player for a brief period of time. If you're making bets from the same IP address that someone else used 3 months ago, does that mean a book should be able to confiscate funds? Clearly not.

Books certainly could check for duplicate IP's prior to a player's cashing out if they wanted. Doing so would be absurdly simplistic. For a book with an adequate server and database these checks shouldn't add more than few seconds of additional processor time to their nightly cron jobs. In most cases probably far, far less.

It's clear that books are happy with the status quo. And why shouldn't they be? Encouraging fraud means more money in their pockets, and for the less scrupulous books, it's probably not an insubstantial amount of money either.

It just bothers me immensely when books try to make asinine claims such as this. It's utterly absurd. Books could easily search for multiple players using the same IP address either nightly or in real time. They just don't want to.

[increasedodds]

Wait a second. In this case, the two players were probably in kahoots. That being said, most players have no idea about an IP issue. Hell most players probably do not know what an IP is. What happens if 2 players open accounts or make bets from the Bellagio's wireless internet? All those accounts have overlapping IPs. Should anyone who bet from the same hotel lose their balance because Wagerweb has a rule about IP addresses?

I am very much a believer if you take a bet, you pay it.

Regarding the bonus guys, it really comes down in my mind whether Charlie knew these guys knew each other or not before giving it. It seems this is unclear or changing...

IP addesses are ridiculously easy to monitor in real time. Don't believe me? Try two things:

1. Log into neteller from a foreign IP address. Your account will lock instantly.

2. Open two accounts at PInnacle from one computer. IN less than 5 minutes, they'll suspend both and send you an email for clarification. This is how books should do it....

US contract law would never allow a company to take back money without monitoring IPs. When Etrade gave $100 to open an account back in 1999, they monitored IPs. No way would they come out 4 years later and ask for their $100 back. If they had the technology in 1999, they have it now. Not monitoring IPs and letting players play is taking a shot. In this case, the players likely knew each other (Unclear if WW knew this) but there are 10000s of cases where players have overlapping IPs by playing at airports, hotels, city networks, etc... Soon all of Chicago and San Francisco will have free wireless networks. Will WW then be able to take all balances from unknowing players? The IP thing is ridiculous. Always has been and always will be.
This issue is messy.

-Sean


Sean -
The rules were clear. Only 1 account per household, and 1 per IP. SBR concluded it was a clear case of player fraud.

What is a person, company or sportsbook's obligation to a fraudulent party to prevent a fraud? The law is clear - NOTHING. If US Contract law would not require Wagerweb to search IPs for duplicate addresses, we are not about to require this. It may be a good idea for sportsbooks to do this, but a book's failure to take "extraordinary fraud prevention methods" does not excuse a player for attempting to commit fraud.

[bigloser]

The whole IP check is a further waste when you consider that the best bonus guys will never get caught by that.

????

So are you saying Luke isnt a bonus abuser then ? as if he was he wouldnt get caught ?
Dont quite follow this statemnet

[andywend]

The vast majority of sportsbooks have safeguards in place to protect themselves from players opening multiple accounts.

While its entirely possible that Luke took a "shot" at WagerWeb concerning the bonus abuse, it pales in comparison to the "shot" that Wagerweb took at Luke.

A respectable sportsbook would have deducted the bonus amount given and processed the remaining portion of the withdrawal and then close his account(s).

If I had an account with WagerWeb, I would immediately request a full withdrawal of my funds after reading this thread.

I wonder if any of the A+ sportsbooks (BetCris, Pinnacle, etc) ever confiscated funds for bonus abuse?

[Dark Horse]

Is this related to the other Wagerweb 80 and 50K complaints?

Not sure if this is legit question, but would like to know:

Why is it that bonus abuse stories seem to have a disproportionate amount of players risking their entire balances?

[luke m.]

Dark Horse, its not related to the other complaints. My sipulation was to wager $75,000, and I wagered $85,000 before I requested a payout. My max bet limit was $2000 on sides and $1000 on totals, and $2000 on parlays.

[Dark Horse]

Thanks. That changes the dynamic, at least for me. In that case I agree that this situation is definitely bordering on a book being the prosecutor and the judge.

Specifically, I have a problem with the reasoning that an account reaches zero because the player has all his funds tied up in bets. That is complete and utter nonsense. The account would reach zero only if all those bets would lose. Meanwhile, the wagers are pending. A completely different situation than an account reaching zero.

Are these all separate WW complaints, or is there a group and greater level of organization?

[Ganchrow]

When Etrade gave $100 to open an account back in 1999, they monitored IPs. No way would they come out 4 years later and ask for their $100 back.

In my opinion, if it were discovered that E-trade had been unilaterally confiscating trading profits of investors who incorrectly (whether fraudulently or not) claimed a $100 sign-up incentive, this would have been a front-page of the Wall Street Journal scandal with the company and the relevant officers paying tens of millions of dollars in fines and restitution, and the officers likely being barred from the industry.

[Dark Horse]

You make an excellent point, Ganch.

On a sidenote, that is a major reason why I'm transferring almost all my action from sports to stocks and options within the next one or two years. Similar type of action, lot more money, and infinitely better regulated.

[Ganchrow]

The vast majority of sportsbooks have safeguards in place to protect themselves from players opening multiple accounts.

While its entirely possible that Luke took a "shot" at WagerWeb concerning the bonus abuse, it pales in comparison to the "shot" that Wagerweb took at Luke.

A respectable sportsbook would have deducted the bonus amount given and processed the remaining portion of the withdrawal and then close his account(s).

If I had an account with WagerWeb, I would immediately request a full withdrawal of my funds after reading this thread.

I have to agree with you completely here.

Wager Web isn't a victim of this silly little scam. They're the beneficiary.

I for one would be very interested to learn how much Wager Web has profited from being "defrauded by bonus abusers". I suspect it would be a sickeningly large amount.

[Dark Horse]

Whoa.

Let's back up a little bit. Why are all these complaints coming in at the same time? I had assumed that this was a group, based on previous experience, but if these are all separate accounts that would mean WW suddenly decided to confiscate these funds. In that case, how did they know to identify these accounts so effectively (after a long period of not realizing the 'fraud'). Just wondering.

[Justin7]

Ganch (I bet the players love it when mods argue),

Technically, I think your hash-table lookup is an X log X function (with X being the number of unique IP addresses), not a straight X function. There would be some additional CPU usage to eliminate redundant IPs (if you have a decent programmer).

Who might take 1m bets a day? Pinnacle, Bwin (surprise, but yet) and Betfair. There might be others, but those are just a few I am familiar with.

You also wrote "It just bothers me immensely when books try to make asinine claims such as this. It's utterly absurd. Books could easily search for multiple players using the same IP address either nightly or in real time. They just don't want to."

From this, I can tell you have never worked at a Sportsbook. The top books have full IT departments, and never have the resources to do extra projects like this. When I worked for a book, I was SHOCKED at the projects that were postponed or not approved until I saw the big picture. Books have to keep servers up, keep them communicating, and keep data properly archived. For a larger book, this can keep half your IT staff busy. You may think your solution is simple, but it might cost a book 100k in a year (plus development costs). Regardless of the cost, I am not inclined to say a book has to do this to prevent bonus fraud if they can do it for 1/10th the cost at a withdrawal.

IncreasedOdds wrote "US contract law would never allow a company to take back money without monitoring IPs." Want to bet? I'll bet you 50k. We can agree to a hypothetical to test this in the courts. I'll win in ANY jurisdiction if there is clear fraud. You're kidding yourself pretending you know the law.

Dark Horse, this dispute is completely separate from the 50k/80k complaints. The amount in dispute is actually about 500k. I'm still waiting for the 10 players to give me contact information so I can interview them (I asked for this 2 days ago, and only have info on 2/13 of them).

Dark horse, I don't think you understand what happened. WagerWeb did two things: they deducted the bonus from the player's account, and they reduced wagers made with bonus funds that the player didn't have. I spent hours going through wager logs and ledgers to make sure the player didn't get screwed by an "error". If you took out his bonus, and limited every wager (in the order they were made) by the available balance, the player went bust. While I would prefer a simpler method to resolve this issue, Wagerweb's solution was reasonable. If the player had broken even, they would have paid him what is due.

In a perfect world, no book would offer bonuses. That would get rid of all these problems. We live in an imperfect world with bonuses and bonus cheats. The player created and bet on a second account with a bonus, and Wagerweb fixed it fairly. The player tried to defraud the book - not the other way around. I am amazed that some of you argue a book should "suck it up" when a player tries to defraud them.

[increasedodds]

All I will tell you is this:

Books have no way to prevent bonus abuse. Anyone who does not believe me, pick a book and I'll bet you $50k I can open 20 accounts without being noticed.

It's not rocket science

Sean

[tacomax]

All I will tell you is this:

Books have no way to prevent bonus abuse. Anyone who does not believe me, pick a book and I'll bet you $50k I can open 20 accounts without being noticed.

That wasn't really the $50K bet that Justin put forward, was it? He called you out on something. Instead of giving the reasoning behind your original statement, you totally changed the subject.

[Dark Horse]

Justin, I would have preferred to see more of a compromise in this case.

Since we're talking about principles, and not numbers, let's assume a case where the player signed up for two separate accounts and received a $25 bonus for each account. Through some incredible run of luck he builds up one account to 50K, even though, at one point, his balance without the bonus technically reached zero. By your reasoning, the player defrauded the book (for all of $25), and therefore loses his 50K balance.

Without getting overly concerned with the details, why not recognize that both parties made mistakes and make a reasonable settlement? (as opposed to trusting a book's reasonable interpretation of its own vague rules).

(FWIW, I wouldn't be so lenient if this was organized bonus scamming.)

[Ganchrow]

I bet the players love it when mods argue

It's nice to know we can bring players some joy.

Technically, I think your hash-table lookup is an X log X function (with X being the number of unique IP addresses), not a straight X function. There would be some additional CPU usage to eliminate redundant IPs (if you have a decent programmer).

No. It's not. The lookup time should be basically independent (again, with some minor exceptions) of the number of unique IP addresses. It's called O(1) in computer science literature. In the real world, however, due to physical hardware limitations (for example a single disk can only store so much) and what are known as "data collisions" (where two items of data would map to the same value) there would in fact be some degradation with as the number of unique IPs increased. But O(n log n)? Not even close.

Running a quick 10,000,000 trial simulation on my home PC, given a hash table of 60 randomly selected IP addresses, a lookup of a single IP took on average 0.402μs (microseconds, or millionths of a second). Increasing the number of IPs by a factor of of 100,000 to 6,000,000, average lookup time increases to 1.61μs, which is a factor of about 4. (If indeed it it were O(n log n), lookup time would increase by a factor of over 381,000.) For our purposes that's close enough to O(1).

You also wrote "It just bothers me immensely when books try to make asinine claims such as this. It's utterly absurd. Books could easily search for multiple players using the same IP address either nightly or in real time. They just don't want to."

From this, I can tell you have never worked at a Sportsbook. The top books have full IT departments, and never have the resources to do extra projects like this. When I worked for a book, I was SHOCKED at the projects that were postponed or not approved until I saw the big picture. Books have to keep servers up, keep them communicating, and keep data properly archived. For a larger book, this can keep half your IT staff busy. You may think your solution is simple, but it might cost a book 100k in a year (plus development costs). Regardless of the cost, I am not inclined to say a book has to do this to prevent bonus fraud if they can do it for 1/10th the cost at a withdrawal.

That's just silly. It's not a project. It's 5 minutes of coding. You're vastly overstating the difficulty of implementing a system such as this by orders of magnitude. The most likely reason why a certain class of book chooses not to do this is because they can make much more money by out-defrauding the defrauders.

1/10th of the cost? Please. If Wager Web really is interested in clearing up this atrocious practice they're welcome to contact me at any time by phone, e-mail, or PM. Even without currently knowing a whit about their system, I guarantee I can put in a place a methodology to check user ids for duplicate IPs either nightly or in real time in less than a day's time and I wouldn't charge them a dime. And I'm not even a programmer.

I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for a phone call, however. As long as no one challenges Wager Web's corrupt, self-serving practices, what incentive would WagerWeb possibly have to modify them?

[andywend]

Justin:

You wrote that "Wagerweb's solution was reasonable" and "Wagerweb fixed it fairly".

First off, there isn't 100% proof that Luke was trying to bonus scam though the evidence is pretty overwhelming against him.

"Reasonable and fairly" assumes some sort of compromise, WAGERWEB STOLE HIS ENTIRE ACCOUNT BALANCE (including his original deposit)!!!

The guy deposits $5,000 and gets a $1,000 bonus and runs it up to almost $12,000. He requests a withdrawal and Wagerweb steals the $12K and thats reasonable and fair? I never accept bonuses from sportsbooks unless I am 100% sure they are legitimate as I have seen these horror stories in the past.

In what possible way could WagerWeb have decided to better enrich themselves? What, in your opinion, would be an UNFAIR or UNREASONABLE decision by Wagerweb?

Do you really believe that a U.S. regulated company would get away with what Wagerweb did?

Have top rated sportsbooks like Pinnacle or BetCris ever done anything like this?

[tacomax]

andywend - just a quick question. You registered for the forums yesterday and so far have made a total of three posts. All three posts are concerning LukeM's dispute with Wagerweb. Have you got some kind of interest in this case over and above anything else which is in the forum or are you involved in any way?

[pjesnik24]

andywend - just a quick question. You registered for the forums yesterday and so far have made a total of three posts. All three posts are concerning LukeM's dispute with Wagerweb. Have you got some kind of interest in this case over and above anything else which is in the forum or are you involved in any way?

is that really important?

[tacomax]

I'd say so. If someone is involved in the case, don't you think they should declare their intentions. When disputes occur, you quite often see people creating duplicate usernames and posting in support of the victim or getting their buddies involved.

If someone from Wagerweb registered anonymously and posted about how they were very fair in the case, is that OK? Or would you prefer them to come clean?

[pjesnik24]

I think it depends what the guy wrote and he asked actually few good questions. It should not be that important who wrote it but what the person wrote IMO.
WagerWeb was always a bit shady for me. I do not recall Pinnacle ever having a problem like this and I am sure they have (or had) at least 5 times more clients than WW.

[BadAzz]

Justin, with all due respect, how can a simple solution cost 100k?
I would believe the books log the IP from which each account is created and also log the IP of each bet that has been made. At least they should do that.

Creating a query to find the duplicate IP's and sending some kind of alert to your accounts personnel should not take more than an hour to build.

[Santo]

The Hash Table solution is an interesting one, I only have limited experience of implementing them, but it would seem feasible, and shouldn't create much load on the server or extra maintenance..

[Revere14]

The player took advantage of the bonuses, violating the "spirit" or intention of the book's offer for NEW signups. This is one of the drawbacks of bonuses and their current structure -- the more lucrative the offer, the more people you will attract who aren't the loyal customers you're targeting.

As far as a player is concerned, there is real money at risk on every bet. It is not fair to assume that the bets would have been placed in the same order and in the same amounts given a smaller account balance. Perhaps the player would have deposited additional funds to make the same wagers in the same amounts. Perhaps all the same bets would have been made for amounts proportionately less. Perhaps the player would have bet some or all of the games at another sportsbook if they had known exactly what action they had or didn't have and what funds were available.

Let's say I was entitled to a bonus when I signed up but for some reason it was overlooked. I can't retroactively INCREASE my wager amounts if it is corrected later. Using hypothetical situations to manipulate the results after the fact is just as egregious, if not more, than bonus abuse itself. There are far better means to discourage bonus hunting than theft.

As for what to do when someone gets "caught" violating the bonus policies, there's no right answer. In this case I don't think the player(s) would have signed up in the first place, let alone made any wagers, if there was no bonus offer. Sending back the original deposit(s) seems like the only solution if you're going to try to recreate a hypothetical situation.

If you want to "chase" bonus hunters away, confiscate their funds. But you better be damn sure you're dealing with a bonus hunter and not a "legitimate" customer every single time you take that extreme action, and you better spell it out in the rules ahead of time.

Revere14

[Ganchrow]

Rereading some of what I wrote last night, I think I might have been giving Justin a rather unfair shake.

Let me make one thing clear: while I disagree with the particular resolution of this issue issue insofar as I believe Wager Web self servingly overstepped their bounds, I nevertheless trust Justin's judgment implicitly. If he determined based on his careful investigation of the facts that Luke did attempt to fraudulently claim bonus money from Wager Web then you won't find argument from me on that issue.

Justin certainly works his butt off for SBR in particular and the online sports betting community in general and looking at what I wrote last night I apologize for not making more clear my own personal appreciation of his efforts.

Thanks, Justin. You're definitely appreciated.

In that light, I'll clarify my problem with this particular situation:

1. Wager Web unilaterally determined a resolution of this issue by cherry picking facts and data so as to maximize their own pecuniary benefit;
2. The standard for resolution imposed by SBR in issues such as this appears to give complete free reign to the sportsbook and to be independent of the severity of the fraud; and
3. Wager Web appears unwilling to put in place very simple procedures to assist in the prevention futures instances of this type of player fraud, most likely (in my own personal opinion) because WW profits so greatly when it uncovers situations such as these.

So that's it. WW's actions just don't pass the smell test. Certainly they were aggrieved by Luke, but their unilaterally determined remedy is all out of proportion with the original offense. What's more, even if the original fraud by Luke had been substantially less severe, we have no reason to believe based on the written judgment by SBR that an equally harsh punishment would have been any less acceptable.

The most disturbing issue to me is that WW is apparently taking no preventative action to deter situations such as this in the future. They'd apparently rather allow the player fraud occur and go unnoticed for as long as possible so they can extract maximum benefit (perhaps even allowing a player to redeposit). To me this suggests complicity on the part of Wager Web. I find it personally unacceptable that a company can be so heavily rewarded for "uncovering" fraud that they implicitly permitted to occur.

[andywend]

Tacomax:

I check the SBR newswire every few days as I have accounts with a few different sportsbooks and I came across this thread. I couldn't believe what Wagerweb did to this guy and also can't believe that SBR is saying WagerWeb acted reasonably and fairly by confiscating his entire balance. I decided to register in this forum to put in my 2 cents.

I have no idea who this Luke person is and have no connection to him in any way. With that being said, it doesn't seem like this Luke guy fits the bonus abuser profile. Most bonus hunters try and figure out a way to meet rollover requirements with as little risk as they can and then cash out as quickly as possible. It looks like this Luke guy is a pretty big bettor.

Assuming I read everything correctly, the guy deposited $5,000, got a $1,000 bonus and approximately doubled his account balance to $11,793. In my opinion, Wagerweb would be wrong if they only returned his original $5,000 deposit to him. However, confiscating his entire 12K balance is outright robbery.

On a couple of occassions, I had problems getting withdrawals processed by slow-pay sportsbooks and Bill Dozer was willing to assist me free of charge. I have the utmost respect for this site and what they do to protect players from unscrupulous sportsbooks which is why I am so surprised by them endorsing WagerWeb's actions on this matter.

I must be missing something about this case and I'm not sure what it is.

[hollins1000]

I think Luke got what he deserved. I also like to take advantage of bonuses and have played at a lot of books (though Carib is my mainstay). I always provide my name and email address and ask the book if I qualify for the bonus or if I have a prior account (b/c sometimes I don't remember if I played at a particular book). This way I know for sure and the book knows I am not trying to cheat them. Based on Justin's review, it is clear to me that multiple accounts were opened by the same person (or group of people). EVERY sportsbook has the same rule about multiple accounts. If you are going to play with fire, don't cry when you get burnt.

[mvan136]

I was envisioning running it every night. But real time would work just fine as well.




Also remember that each IP would map to many many bets. Even if a book had 2,000,000 bets in a day it wouldn't mean that that's how many IP addresses it would have. The number of IP addresses would be far, far fewer. Furthermore, each IP address should realistically only be locked in to a certain player for a brief period of time. If you're making bets from the same IP address that someone else used 3 months ago, does that mean a book should be able to confiscate funds? Clearly not.

Books certainly could check for duplicate IP's prior to a player's cashing out if they wanted. Doing so would be absurdly simplistic. For a book with an adequate server and database these checks shouldn't add more than few seconds of additional processor time to their nightly cron jobs. In most cases probably far, far less.

It's clear that books are happy with the status quo. And why shouldn't they be? Encouraging fraud means more money in their pockets, and for the less scrupulous books, it's probably not an insubstantial amount of money either.

It just bothers me immensely when books try to make asinine claims such as this. It's utterly absurd. Books could easily search for multiple players using the same IP address either nightly or in real time. They just don't want to.

Ganchrow,

You make some good points on how easy this would be for books to search for multiple players using the same IP address either nightly or in real time. But why should they have to. It is on their website one account per household one per IP address. The rule was broken funds taken away.

The players could have gotten around this by using a proxy or calling in bets. Do you think the books should have to record every phone number bets are made from. They should invest in voice recognition software.

Why is it only on them to prevent fraud. How about the players stop doing it.

Wagerweb give the money away to charity in this players name. You shouldn't benefit from this.

[Doug]

Book might want to take these steps on their own, to avoid having bad threads about them at multiple forums.

How many players will avoid WW because of all this ?

[Ganchrow]

Wagerweb give the money away to charity in this players name.

Interesting.

From where did you get this information?

[mvan136]

Quote:
Originally Posted by mvan136
Wagerweb give the money away to charity in this players name.

Interesting.

From where did you get this information?


It's a statement. It is what I think they should do.

[Doug]

Interesting.

From where did you get this information?

I think he offers that as a suggestion, but from WW's viewpoint the money is theirs now because they consider themselves correct, and SBR backed them up on it.


What would the charity gift amount be ?

[Ganchrow]

Wagerweb give the money away to charity in this players name.

Interesting.

From where did you get this information?

It's a statement. It is what I think they should do.

My apologies. I had misunderstood that part of your post.

[mvan136]

I think he offers that as a suggestion, but from WW's viewpoint the money is theirs now because they consider themselves correct, and SBR backed them up on it.


What would the charity gift amount be ?

I say the $12,000 or whatever was in the account.

[Doug]

I say the $12,000 or whatever was in the account.

I can't see WW doing that. They lost a ton with all the bad publicity already, way more than 12k worth of bad vibes, and a lot more in dispute. If they donate it,its like admitting they are wrong,IMO.

Best thing they could have done (to protect their formerly OK name), would have been to detect this stuff early, now the damage is severe,even if they win the other cases.

I used to like this book, but can't see going back, its like they are vulnerable to fail at any time because of these issues.

This is a no-win spot for WW, they lose no matter what happens next,IMO !