One of the hard and fast rules of gambling is that the house always wins, but Australian operator Sportsbet is proving that rule can be bent. Sportsbet is on the hook for $93,000 (AUD) ($64,000 USD) after allowing a self-excluded player wager more than $150,000 without picking up on the fact that he shouldn’t have been playing in the first place.
The decision in favor of the player came down from the Northern Territory Racing Commission (NTRC), the regulating body in charge of sportsbooks in Australia. They were not particularly impressed with Sportsbet’s reasoning about why the player, known only as “Mr. XXXX, was allowed to set an account with the company after placing himself on the self-excluded list. Operators are responsible for not only keeping excluded players off their membership rolls, but also keeping them from registering on their rolls under different addresses, etc…Unfortunately, that didn’t happen in this case and Mr. XXXX gambled like someone who could really afford to lose, which he wasn’t.
Not surprisingly, none of this sat well with the NTRC who, according to a report on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, said, “On the evidence before it, the Commission is satisfied that Sportsbet did not have at the time appropriate self-exclusion facilities and procedures in place to allow persons to self-exclude.”
SportsBet did not fight the ruling and said that they’ve taken steps to insure that the Mr. XXXX situation does not occur again. Given the industry’s understandable desire to keep the house winning whenever possible, this is a goal they are very likely to achieve.