Boylesports removing "offers" from players who have made small profit.

[Peter Willis]

On Monday I received the following e-mail from Boylesports:

We wish to inform you that we are making changes to the way we administer your sports betting account. As you are aware, Boylesports.com provides extra value for its customers through regular promotional offers such as Cashback Specials, Best Price Guaranteed and Free Bets.

After a review of your account we have decided that it will no longer benefit from these and other gestures classified as 'special offers'.

Should you have any queries regarding this change in policy, please contact our customer service team.

Intrigued as to the reasoning, I responded to get further details and was sent the following:

In order to be competitive in the modern online betting environment we must offer highly generous special offers, but we must reluctantly withdraw these offers from accounts where it is does not appear economically feasible to do so.

Should the structure of our current special offers change we shall review your account and consider whether you shall be eligible to receive special offers again.

Unfortunately our Management Team who conducted the review do not disclose the criteria they used to exclude customers from the offers.

I can understand them doing this in certain circumstances (e.g. a player taking advantage of the offers repeatedly to make a consistent profit) but in this instance the only real "offer" I have made use of is the "Best Odds Guaranteed" promotion on horses (which numerous bookmakers offer in the UK).

Furthermore, and this is my main concern for questioning their behaviour, I checked my entire account history with Boylesports.

Total Stake: £296.75
Total Return: £361.25
Profit: £64.50

Are they actually suggesting that an account which in profit to the tune of £64.50 is not "economically feasible"?

Remember, Boylesports actively use these "offers" which they have now stripped from my account to acquire new players. Yet once you break through a threshold (which I'll guess is £50 given I won £30 on Saturday just gone) you're account either comes up for review, or you automatically are removed.

It seems both entirely unethical to me, and indeed is probably of interest to the Advertising Standards Agency given how prominent offers such as Best Odds Guaranteed are as part of their promotional activity both online and on TV.

Naturally, I have closed my account.

A quick scan of Google found a number of other users had the same e-mail this week.

http://www.thefootballnetwork.net/bo...m?900,13148311
http://www.northstandchat.com/showth...75-Boylesports

[iGamingWriter]

If there are multiple reports of this happening at the one time it's unlikely to be a threshold and more likely to have been a general review of accounts that were in profit or a review of accounts that have signed up in the last x months. The likelihood is that upon review Boyle realised that given your betting history, if you continued to use the promotion in the fashion you had been you were unlikely to generate any revenue for them. While you account individually isn't a big threat, when there are lots of accounts that are likely to make small profits, this can become a big issue.

As to advertising standards, i really doubt you have much of a case. As a private company Boyle have the right to deny service to anyone they choose as long as they are not doing so based on religious, sexual or racial reasons. Alongside this, you were allowed to participate in said promotion and only after a review did they pull this priviledge. You've received the promotion for some length of time and if you're unhappy with it's removal you're completely free to play somewhere else. If they had immediatly stopped you from receiving promotions as soon as you signed up and deposited, or emailed you a promotion that you deposited for and then were denied before being told you had to role over the balance before you could withdraw it, that would be far more likely to give you a chance. I might be wrong, but as it is i don't see any complaint getting anywhere with the ASA.

The POGG