UK firm offers £100 for personal details to open betting accounts, raising concerns over safety, legality, and motives. (Image by Rachakrit Suttarattanamongkol on Vecteezy)
The Casinoplusbonus research term placed an interesting news article on my desk today that comes via the Guardian newspaper.
According to the reputable broadsheet publication, a company called Moneyful Ltd has been offering people £100 to share their personal information to open sports betting accounts. Whether the offer also extends to online casinos was not mentioned.
However, a warning has been raised warning users that sharing personal information so the company can open these accounts could be an unsafe practice.
One of Moneyful’s alleged promotional tactics is to claim that UK citizens who sign up for the program can make large sums of cash.
Users that have signed up for the program upload a government issued ID and proof of address. Already, I can see this is so the company can pass the KYC checks for the sports books in question.
Another worrying aspect of this deal is that those who sign up for the program also need to apply for a VISA card so the company can deposit funds into the sports betting account. Of course, these have to be debit cards because UK online gambling platforms do not accept credit card payments.
Read on to see two theories as to why we think this UK business is offering this service to players.
Theory 1 – It Is An Affiliate Site Scam
Here on Casinoplusbonus, when you sign up for an online casino via our iGaming portal, we sometimes receive a commission from the affiliate site. The commission compensates us for our research, the time taken performing casino reviews, and for this very news report I am writing.
There are many other sites out there offering similar services. AskGamblers is owned by a casino tech company, GIG, LCB, Demoslot, and Casino Guru.
All of us earn a commission. Therefore, one theory is that there is an affiliate casino website out there connected to Moneyful Ltd. When the company opens an account with the casino via an affiliate link, the sports betting affiliate website is hypothetically connected to receive a commission.
Whether the affiliate website knows this or not is another question. It could be that Moneyful Ltd sold a service promising the affiliate website more sign-ups, and the £100 given to UK citizens is a drop in the ocean compared to the amount the company is charging the affiliate site.
As a result, there are two theories in one here in my possible reasoning behind why Moneyful Ltd is offering this service.
Honestly, this is a far-fetched theory. It’s just me using my knowledge of the online gambling industry and using my imagination to come up with a possible theory. It was fun to write anyway!
Theory 2 – The Guardian Newspapers Theory
The Guardian has its theory on the matter. It probably didn’t think about my theory above because the newspaper is not a gambling specialist, and neither is the journalist who wrote the article – UK consumers warned over offers of money.
Yet, the Guardian journalist Rob Davies offers an equally or possibly more plausible reason as to why Moneyful Ltd is offering UK citizens £100 to use their service. That theory is that the company uses a sophisticated Match Betting system, which requires multiple betting accounts.
I know Match Betting strategies work for some people. I have an Aussie friend who uses such a strategy via Aussi sports books, but he often complains that the sports bet sites ban their accounts. They then use a friend’s account until it is banned, and so on.
The idea is essentially what we would call bonus hunting. The company will claim the sports book free bet welcome bonus. However, wagering requirements are not as simple as you might think to make money from.
They are not easy at the best of times with online casinos due to wagering requirements. And while sportsbooks offer lower wagering requirements compared to online casinos, there is usually a rule players have to place their free bet on a market with even odds or more, so there is no guarantee of a win.
Another way that the company could make money from using several accounts is by strategically hedging bets across multiple sports books. They can take advantage of varying odds to hedge bets by using multiple accounts.
Are the sports books aware? Not a chance. As mentioned with my Aussie friend, sports books ban people’s accounts for this type of activity. It is a little like Blackjack car counting, which is not illegal but against the rules of most casinos.
What Did Moneyful Ltd Have to Say
The Guardian has probably done the company a solid because as the old saying goes, even bad publicity can be good publicity. Now more people are aware they can earn a free £100.
Maybe the Guardian journalist Rob Davies is in on the deal (only joking)! Yet, I’d like to see whether the company has made more money due to this publicity. Seeing as I am a stifler for checking casino operator companies, I decided to check whether Moneyful is a registered UK firm, and it is as per the Moneyful Ltd UK Companies House info here.
On a more serious note, Moneyful Ltd said it is a registered UK company.
It also states that it has nothing to hide from its customers, and the services are optional. Well played because if theory number two above is correct, which is more plausible than my over-imaginative theory, then the owners of this company have created an intelligent operation.
Is Moneyful’s operation legal? Yes, it seems so. There do not appear to be any laws that prevent the company from offering the services that it does. However, using other people’s accounts is a little dubious and 100% against the sports book T&Cs.
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