Thank you for your email. I am personally now out of the office for the holiday season but our team work through.
I will pass on the email to them to address. Please note in any case we will refund any charges for 6 months should a customer re-activate or choose to close his account.
Regards, Niall
Ferru123 wrote:PS I've just forwarded the original email I received about the charge to Niall Wass, Betfair's Chief Marketing and Development Officer, along with the following comments:
Mr Wass
I am unhappy with the forwarded email below:
A. How is it fair or lawful to charge customers for not using their accounts? Banks justify their penalty charges on the grounds that they have to send out letters, which costs them money. What costs does Betfair incur if I have an account that I never use?
B. It pressures people who may have stopped using their account due to a gambling addiction to use it again. Surely such behaviour is not appropriate for a company that holds a gambling license.
C. The timing of the email is poor. Many people receiving the email will be on their Christmas holiday, and will not be aware that they are going to be charged until it’s too late. And surely your customers have better things to do during their Christmas break than logging into a Betfair account (whose password they have probably forgotten), just to avoid an unlawful charge.
D. In small print at the bottom of the email, a link is given to a page where I can supposedly find out further information about the Inactive Account Fees policy. However, a key word search on that page for the word ‘inactive’ yields nothing. Can I suggest that you create a page specifically about the Inactive Account Fee, and include in future such emails a link to that page?
Have you ever wondered what happens to the money left in BF’s dormant accounts if the people who own them die and have no dependants or if they do no one knows of it’s existence. If BF is never asked to refund the money it could remain there till the end of time. This way BF get to take the money and when the account is drained close it.
its not so bad by the look of it. that's what I got from bf. By the way I had a similar problem with SKYPE. they took all my credit for not making any calls for 6 months.
****************************************
Thank you for your e-mail.
Your account will become ‘Inactive’ after 13 consecutive months of inactivity. Inactivity means not logging into your Betfair account.
Please note that the account will lose its ‘Inactive Account’ status if you log into the account; you do not need to place a bet in order to reactivate the account.
Whilst the account remains inactive a charge of ?5.00 will be applied each month commencing on 31st December 2010. This will continue until you reactivate, or until your balance is zero.
Having looked in to your query I can confirm that your main account '*******' has a balance of ******. You will need to log in to this account only ONCE every 13 months to prevent any charges being made to this account.
Further to this I can confirm that the list of accounts below ALL have a balance of ZERO, therefore you do not need to close these accounts as there isn't any money in them for Betfair to take the charge.
*******
Please do not hesitate to contact us if you have any further enquiries.
Following my email to Betfair, which I posted in this thread, I've received a detailed reply (from Phil Cohen, Betfair's Head of Customer Services).
This is what Mr Cohen wrote:
In your e-mail you raised several points that I shall try to answer individually.
1. How is it fair or lawful to charge customers for not using their accounts? Banks justify their penalty charges on the grounds that they have to send out letters, which costs them money. What costs does Betfair incur if I have an account that I never use?
Like many businesses, Betfair incurs significant fixed costs associated with monitoring and maintaining customer accounts in order to protect them from fraud and to ensure their account security. Unlike active accounts, inactive accounts do not contribute revenue towards covering these costs and will accordingly incur a monthly fee. Please note that we will remind customers who are due to become inactive that they are about to incur the fee, twice beforehand, and we believe that we are giving the majority of customers sufficient time to either close their accounts and/or withdraw their funds, or to log in to their account to re-activate before they incur the fee.
2. It pressures people who may have stopped using their account due to a gambling addiction to use it again. Surely such behaviour is not appropriate for a company that holds a gambling license.
We do take our social responsibility requirements extremely seriously and do not feel that we are encouraging problem gamblers to reactivate. Furthermore the inactive account fee and the implementation of it is 100% in line with what our regulators entitle us to do. No customer that has previously self-excluded will incur this charge and customer’s that may have closed their account for reasons other than problem gambling are only contacted if they have money left in their account, as we want to alert them to this fact. You will note that in order to reactivate, customers do not need to place a bet as they just need to log in.
3. The timing of the email is poor. Many people receiving the email will be on their Christmas holiday, and will not be aware that they are going to be charged until it’s too late. And surely your customers have better things to do during their Christmas break than logging into a Betfair account (whose password they have probably forgotten), just to avoid an unlawful charge.
I agree that due to the time of year some customers may not see our reminder e-mails until after the fee has been introduced. However please note that we are happy to refund up to 6 months’ worth of fees incurred. All customers need to do is contact our Helpdesk and we will arrange for a refund. I also agree that due to inactivity some customers will have forgotten their password, but this can be updated via the website or again customers have the option of contacting our Helpdesk and we can assist them.
4. In small print at the bottom of the email, a link is given to a page where I can supposedly find out further information about the Inactive Account Fees policy. However, a key word search on that page for the word ‘inactive’ yields nothing. Can I suggest that you create a page specifically about the Inactive Account Fee, and include in future such emails a link to that page?
We do include details of the fee in the Betfair Charges section of the website (paragraph 8) which can be found in ‘About Us’. We have also updated our ‘Help’ section to include details. However I would like to thank you for your feedback and we will look to enhance the visibility of the information relating to the inactive account fee along the lines of your suggestion.
Like many businesses, Betfair incurs significant fixed costs associated with monitoring and maintaining customer accounts in order to protect them from fraud and to ensure their account security. Unlike active accounts, inactive accounts do not contribute revenue towards covering these costs and will accordingly incur a monthly fee. Please note that we will remind customers who are due to become inactive that they are about to incur the fee, twice beforehand, and we believe that we are giving the majority of customers sufficient time to either close their accounts and/or withdraw their funds, or to log in to their account to re-activate before they incur the fee.
What a load of ballony. Inactive accounts are a marketing problem not a customer problem.
I thought the point of the 5% commission was to cover Betfair's costs and leave them with a profit. I don't see the justification of charging someone for a service that they don't use!
And why does merely logging into an inactive account mean you avoid the £5 charge?!? It goes against Betfair's stated reason for having the charge!
Jeff
Corker wrote:
What a load of ballony. Inactive accounts are a marketing problem not a customer problem.
I asked Betfair a couple of further questions (which Euler came up with).
Question: Why is the charge not applicable in Australia?
Answer: We are currently trialling the inactive account fees for UK customers. We will be getting feedback before deciding whether to use the same fee abroad.
I wonder if this is another way of saying 'We'll only subject our Aussie customers to the inactive charge if the UK customers don't kick up a fuss' - Jeff
Question: Why are commissions and charges paid on linked accounts and yet the definition of inactivity is not? Betfair obviously have linked the accounts and could see this if they tried.
Answer: There would be potentially a lot of abuse if we were to link accounts therefore we have decided to go on an account basis on these charges. You only need to log into the account to not incur the charge not neccessarily bet on the account.
I've received a further answer to those questions (this time from Phil Cohen, the Head of Customer Services):
Firstly we are currently awaiting approval from the Australian regulator before we introduce the charge to Australian customers.
With regards to the linking of accounts, we do not actively encourage customers to have more than one Betfair account and therefore see having more than one account as the customer’s responsibility. If a customer does have more than one account and (at least) one of those accounts is inactive then he/she will be liable for the charge.
Jeff
Ferru123 wrote:I asked Betfair a couple of further questions (which Euler came up with).
Question: Why is the charge not applicable in Australia?
Answer: We are currently trialling the inactive account fees for UK customers. We will be getting feedback before deciding whether to use the same fee abroad.
I wonder if this is another way of saying 'We'll only subject our Aussie customers to the inactive charge if the UK customers don't kick up a fuss' - Jeff
Question: Why are commissions and charges paid on linked accounts and yet the definition of inactivity is not? Betfair obviously have linked the accounts and could see this if they tried.
Answer: There would be potentially a lot of abuse if we were to link accounts therefore we have decided to go on an account basis on these charges. You only need to log into the account to not incur the charge not neccessarily bet on the account.
poker sites do the same to inactive accounts, at least they do to mine, as do Neteller (the worldwide online money transfer site).
No doubt Betfair cynically chose what they considered to be the most profitable time, but I suspect that they're also trying to avoid acruing an unmanageably large number of accounts which will need to be included in audits and other general b*******g-about tasks, required, these days,
If I were to set up an account and not use it, I can't see how that would cost Betfair any money.
OK, they would need to store my account details on a server, along with those of millions of other inactive accounts. But these days, memory is so cheap that the cost would be negligible.
As for audits, etc, surely it doesn't matter whether you have ten thousand or ten million customers, providing you have a robust enough database to give you the information you need.
Jeff
Predicton wrote:Hi,
poker sites do the same to inactive accounts, at least they do to mine, as do Neteller (the worldwide online money transfer site).
No doubt Betfair cynically chose what they considered to be the most profitable time, but I suspect that they're also trying to avoid acruing an unmanageably large number of accounts which will need to be included in audits and other general b*******g-about tasks, required, these days,
