Reporting from Bet Chat HQ, Northern Ireland…
Look at the absolute state of that image. It’s what I was greeted by when logging into my Dabble app (soon to be deleted) last week.
Two things stand out for me…
The first is that this happened shortly after I contacted their customer service team to point out that they’d incorrectly settled a non-runner as a loser. Coincidence? I think not.
The second is the last line, which made me laugh out loud: “Promotional offers are only open to users acting in good faith, who place bets with Dabble for the purpose of recreation and entertainment”.
For ‘recreation and entertainment’, read: losing. Although I would question just how entertaining consistently losing your pay packet to the bookies is.
Also, as a point of note, I didn’t engage in any matched betting or arbitrage with Dabble (not that it should matter), nor did I try to get away with multi-accounts or any other nefarious activities.
Woe is us
My tale above certainly isn’t a new one, but it does feel a bit like an old man shouting at clouds, because it isn’t going to change simply by the likes of us highlighting the issue.
Speak to any casual or non-bettors, and they pretty much all fall into three camps:
- They don’t believe people who genuinely make money from betting exist.
- They believe betting is the devil’s work and want nothing to do with it.
- They just don’t care.
Rights for winning bettors? No chance with the myriad other much larger problems that the UK, Europe, and planet Earth have at the moment.
So, what can we do about it?
This would be huge
Here’s my pitch (and I genuinely think it would be enormously successful):
We create a legitimately fair bookmaker. The first of its kind (on these shores at least).
A bookmaker that commits to accepting a bet guaranteed to win at least £500, say, from anybody.
A bookmaker that encourages matched betting or arbitrage.
A bookmaker that actively celebrates winners, rather than try to screw them out of their winnings by claiming software failures or asking for 297 different forms of ID on withdrawal.
A bookmaker that profits from exactly what a bookmaker should profit from – margin and over-round – and NOT from greed.
It’d make a fortune because it has what all successful businesses need: a USP. It also, crucially, would as good as market itself due to that USP.
If you think Paddy Power are good at marketing, just imagine what you could do with this. We would actively highlight and call out the nefarious practises of other bookmakers…
“It is literally against the terms and conditions to win money from these bookies. With us, it’s not.” Clear. Simple. Provocative enough to go viral.
And what’s more, we’d have a huge pool of losing bettors to tap into…
Long-term losers who were banned by ArryRedknappBet, DannyDyerDollas and Boylesports two days after opening an account.
I mean, it’s hardly as if the big books can copy us, is it? What are they going to do? Go against their business model from the past decade and suddenly unban and unrestrict everyone, thus admitting to the truth, rather than the long-established party line: “Yes, generic, well-meaning but clueless news reporter, some customers do have their account access removed, but it’s only a tiny minority who have actively breached our terms and conditions”.
Good luck with that.
So, do you have £1.5million spare?
I don’t make a habit of doing this, but I logged into ChatGPT the other day, and I asked it how much it would cost to set up a new, UK-regulated, online bookmaker. The answer was somewhere in the region of £1.5million.
So, who’s with me?
