Sports bettor worried Bet365 won’t pay out his winnings
Alleges company is ‘unethical’ and claims regulator isn’t helping
Kenneth Perry is a sports bettor and up until recently was a frequent user of the popular gambling platform Bet365. Now, he couldn’t be more upset with the company and is worried won’t be paid more than $6,300 in winning which he claims they owe him.
“Bet365 is extremely unethical. Bet365 has the worst customer service. Bet365 does a horrible job of treating their customers with first class service,” says the human resources professional from Toronto.
Perry didn’t always feel this way about Bet365 and enjoyed betting on the platform for years after first joining in 2018. He focused on football, hockey, and basketball.
He elevated his hobby after joining a sports wagering group called inplayLIVE, which as the name suggests, focuses on wagering live while the game is on- something Bet365 heavily promotes in their television advertisement featuring Hollywood actor Aaron Paul.
Perry says he grew his account to about $20,000, and he reaped the rewards, withdrawing about $14,000 from the account without issue in the spring. But everything changed the evening of Thursday October 6th.
His account became limited. “I go to place a wager and it told me the max bet I can make I think was 25 cents,” says Perry, who was caught off guard by the practice which has become increasingly common in the wagering world.
No longer feeling like the platform wanted his business, Perry decided to make another withdrawal. He requested payment via wire transfer to his CIBC bank account for $6,334, which would leave him with $100 remaining in the Bet365 account just in case they lifted the restrictions. Bet365 told him the money could take up to three business days to arrive in his account.
Perry waited a full week and did not receive the payment. He emailed Bet365 on October the 13th and received a response on October 17th telling him, “we have investigated further and can confirm that the withdrawal has been processed successfully.” But CIBC told Perry they had no evidence that a wire transfer was ever initiated.
Perry goes back and forth between Bet365 and CIBC for several more days, engaging in phone calls, email exchanges, and live chats. At one point Bet365 offers Perry $100 in bet credits, “and I'm like, I don't really want the $100 credit…I only have a betting limit of 25 cents.”
On October 31st, the Toronto man decides to escalate the matter and gets iGaming Ontario involved, which is the regulator in the province meant to protect players. He copies the regulator on his email exchanges with Bet365 and that’s when the gambling company tells him there’s been an issue with the merchant used to deliver the wire transfer, and again he’s told to expect the payment within five business days.
Guess what? A couple of weeks go by, and the payment is not received. Perry maintains his persistence and reaches out again on November 15th. That’s when he’s told the payment isn’t with the merchant and is under review with the company’s payments team.
“They've been unapologetic and they pretty much have been giving me the runaround, where it makes me believe as a player, I'm never going to get paid,” says Perry, “I look crazy to my bank. My bank says no money has ever been received. I go back to Bet365, they tell me the money has been received with your bank, to the money is with our merchant, to the money is with our payments team, to it's under review now.”
We made repeated attempts to reach out to the head of public affairs at Bet365, Ursula Servis, but our emails did not receive a response. We also reached out to iGaming Ontario for comment, but those requests also went unanswered.
Perry says iGaming Ontario has told him Bet365 has 90 days from the initial withdrawal request to fulfill the payment. If he still hasn’t been paid by then, the regulator will launch its own investigation. “I asked them what that means and what that entails, and they didn’t really answer me.”
Perry has no choice but to wait and hope, but he’s not confident he’ll receive his winnings, “I just don't believe they're actually going to pay me.”
Shane Mercer
Shane is a journalist with nearly two decades of experience covering news and sports in Canada. He is well versed in digital, television and radio platforms. Shane enjoys the outdoors, sports, and spending time with his wife and three daughters.