Quote:
Originally Posted by Monteroy
The only real way to get rid of the problem is eliminate the exchange facility entirely, and then nearly everyone has to eventually pay a premium for every deposit/withdraw transaction - kind of like how it is on nearly every other site.
Pokerstars has used this approach for instance last year when many people were abusing them for Skrill cashback - they simply withdrew from the Skrill VIP points program as that was a much easier solution than all the time needed to determine who was abusing it and to what extent.
I think that making a profit, (margin), from a player by charging the deposit or withdrawal fees is wrong because such fees are simply a cost of doing business: similar to paying good programmers; paying for good and more staff; paying for advertising; paying affiliates; and so on. Businesses don't have to do any of these things, but choose to to try to become the choice of prospective customers, and thereby make more gross profit out of selling whatever the product is that they are offering.
Banks are in the money business so charging fees is obviously an acceptable and essential part of their business; poker sites are in the poker business and should only be making profit from the rake from the games they provide.
If a poker site only took deposits from their customers in dollars, and only paid out in dollars, I would doubt if many players would complain to the site that their banks charged them fees for changing their home currency to dollars and vice versa. (Whether they chose to play on that site is another matter.)
Likewise, if a site chose to take money in pounds, euros, yen, or whatever, in the hope of gaining additional customers, and then paid back out to the relevant depositors only in pounds, euros, etc, (something again that customers would have little to complain about), their choice to do this should be regarded as a cost of business, and any fees they were charged by their banks should be taken out of their gross profit. The pounds in the customer's account could be changed into dollars at the table, and vice versa, at negligible cost to anyone, using whatever exchange rate was applicable on the day of transfer to the table.
When a site decides that taking in in dollars and paying out in euros is the way to compete for more customers, again, it's a cost of business they have chosen to pay, and the exchange fees should be borne by the site out of gross profit; which has been increased by the additional rake earned from the additional customers attracted because of their business decision. (If the gross profit has not been increased enough, then obviously the business decision was wrong and should be reversed.)
And that's all I have to say about that.