Dispute avoidance advice

Sports Betting – Dealing with Corrections to Statistical Data

In the last six months we have received a growing number of reasonable complaints from consumers, concerned that a provider of sporting statistical data has made a mistake and amended their records but without any impact on the settlement of their bet. We have also received complaints that a gambling operator has resettled a winning bet as a loser after a match has ended and the consumer has apparently not understood why.

One of the most important factors in sports betting has always been the cut off point for settlement of bets. Many of these have become industry standards – Formula One bets are settled on the podium positions, Golf tournament betting on the player who lifts the trophy and so on.

We call on betting operators to introduce similarly clear principles for the increasingly popular statistical markets they offer. If a provider of sports data supplies a correction/amendment to data that was originally sent (and potentially already used for bet settlement) it should be clear whether there is a cut off point for those corrections to apply – and if so, it should be clear when it applies.

For example:

“We use data supplied by “website name” and published on “website” to determine the settlement of statistical markets. Any amendments to those statistics made more than 30 minutes after the final whistle will not count for settlement purposes”.

Alerting Customers to Potentially Surprising Terms

As with other ADR providers in the gambling sector, IBAS is asked by the Gambling Commission to consider whether rules or terms used to determine the outcome of bets or games are potentially unfair or have been applied in an unfair manner.

One of the tests used by IBAS and recommended by the Office of Fair Trading (OFT), is to ask whether the rule or term would likely come as a surprise to the average consumer if brought to their attention.

The OFT tells businesses that the more likely a contract term may surprise the consumer, the greater emphasis on the business to make the term prominent and accessible.

We would encourage operators to consider whether there are certain messages that could and should be displayed on screen, perhaps as a pop-up, e.g. during the account opening process, on pages used to deposit funds, or on pages where bonuses are offered/accepted, to avoid any accusation at a later date that something surprising but fundamental was not mentioned until it was too late for the consumer to do anything about it.