I have a friend who I stake at poker. He lives in the U.S. and plays almost exclusively on Ignition.

This summer he came to visit me in Canada. He couldn't login to his Ignition account from Canada so he called customer service and asked what to do. They told him to make a new account on Bodog to use while he was in Canada.

He plays on the account. Runs fairly well and cashes all of the money out before leaving town. No Problems.

He has just came back to Canada at the beginning of the month to visit another friend. He called customer service to tell them that he was visiting from the U.S. and had already had a Bodog account from the last time he visited Canada but couldn't remember the password. They told him to create another new account (as opposed to offering to retrieve his old password.)

Fast forward 10 days and some run good that turned a ~$5k deposit into ~$25k. We decide it's time to start cashing some of the money out of the account so he puts in a withdrawal request.

The next day he gets this email:

" Your withdrawal reference number is 314946525. Our records indicate that we require the following documentation from you:

A copy of government issued photo ID (e.g. Drivers License) and proof of address within the last 60 days (e.g. utility bill). Please send the documents to verification@bodog.eu

Once your documentation has been received and verified, we will continue with your withdrawal request"


So he calls customer service again and explains how he's just in Canada visiting and following the directions he had gotten from the previous customer service agents. The customer service lady seemed optimistic and said he should expect a call back within a few hours.

A man calls back. He explains that he is very sorry and understands that his customer service had misinformed my friend. BUT he still must confiscate the winnings and close the account citing breach of their terms of service, section 3.2.

https://www.bodog.eu/help/terms-and-...age/tc-general


Do we have any recourse here? Who, if anyone, can we contact for help?

yeah , call the cops. lol. of course you dont have recourse .

but hopefully they will do the right thing for sake of there brand. GL

why didn't he use the password retrieval tool on their website?

To be clear, his account winnings were confiscated because he is American, not because it was his second account.

I should have made that clear in the original post.

Bodog/Ignition - escalate the issue.

I know this is no help to your situation now, but in future get instructions via email rather than a phone call, therefore you have something in writing.

Yeah, I was also thinking it was a shame it was all done over the phone, which I'm guessing was done to expedite things.

I'm going to scour the internet for more evidence that telling players to make a new account is their policy.

I know they told me this same piece of advice (albeit in reverse since i was coming from Canada to USA) when I came to the U.S. back in 2014. I've also read threads here on 2p2 where other players note that this is how you should play while traveling. It's not as though this is a one-off mistake they made and told him just this once (or rather just these two consecutive times.)

What address did he use when he created those new accounts?

I'm not sure they require an address when signing up but if they do then I'm sure he gave them my address when he signed up last summer and his friend's address most recently.

I'll have him call customer service back today. Maybe we will get a different crew this time.

I don't know that we have much leverage other than telling them we will go to social media and be in contact with some lawyers.

I'm extremely pleased to update this thread. My friend was just woken up to a call from Bodog. They are going to pay out his full balance. Got this email:

Hi *********,



As per our conversation earlier today, please respond directly to this email with a Bitcoin Address to which we can send your remaining balance of $20,369.61.



If you have any questions or require any assistance, please let us know.



Best regards,



Bodog Player Advocacy

Excellent outcome! Quite frankly, it's what I expect from their operation. They care about their reputation.

--
Kahn

I sure hope you're right.

It now appears we aren't out of the woods yet. He got another email asking for his ID again. The same, seemingly automatically generated email that started this whole debacle. He called back again and yet again support is supposed to call him back some time "in the next few days."

We will call back to talk to the day shift in a few hours and hopefully it's easier to straighten out this time since they already decided to resolve in our favor once.

Why do you keep trying to handling this via phone calls?

I would reply to the "please respond directly to this email with a Bitcoin Address to which we can send your remaining balance of $20,369.61.", saying that you received another ID request, and ask to look into this.

That's a reasonable suggestion (and will been done) but I'd guess you've never dealt with this network before. They seem to be trained to just give you repeated asinine responses via email if you attempt to go that route. Initially it's near the same when you call, except you can eventually get someone on the phone that can help (this is never the case via email, they'll just give you stock responses and the run-around forever.)

Final update:

Paid out $20,066 by Bodog. The $300 missing in the quoted amount is probably from a bonus we shouldn't get paid out or bad BTC pricing. Not worth contesting any further.

Two times Bodog/Bovada/Ignition has given us a hard time and said there was no appeal process. Both times they have ended up doing the right thing in the end.

The one other time they hosed us on a withdrawal (shorted us by 500ish dollars) and they claimed they wouldn't do anything about it but then the next day they credited us with a no play through bonus.