This one isn’t an April fools. If you have money in Betbutler, start trying to get it out now. It will take weeks to get out if at all. So make your withdrawal and call them every few hours chasing up your withdrawal.
This story has been waiting for 4 weeks as a friend was trying to get money out himself and didn’t want an even bigger rush and as he was the one telling me about it I wanted to respect his wishes, but he is still waiting now and has given me the go ahead to post. There have also been topics on the SBC forum about this very issue too.
My friends story
“I made a withdrawal in late Feb and the max withdrawal is £2,000 and their terms say it takes 5 days to process, after 9 days I was still waiting so I emailed them and waited, I emailed again and after a further 3 days I rang them. The phone operator was helpful and said he would process it that day. I received the payment later that day. After this experience I wanted to get the rest of my balance out and requested another withdrawal. After another 8 days I had no payment or reply and rang them, I was promised the withdrawal would be processed in 24 hours, I rang 3 days in a row and was promised the same thing every time and am still waiting. I fear for my money and looking at twitter I see the same situation with many others. I just hope I can get the rest of my money out before they go bust and I will never deposit there again”
I personally have never had a Betbutler account and these complaints are just ones I have heard. Again, this is just a warning and they might be financially stable. But by the look of things that is not true. The same issues have been ongoing for over a year but it seems much worse now.
BetButler started with a pretty simple idea. Have one account with them instead of making a heap of accounts with all other bookies. You would get great prices and never be limited. Pretty simple concept and appealing for many people. They would take a small percentage of your winnings and also kickbacks from sportsbook affiliate schemes. This made sense and would have worked well as a small business. But the people behind it didn’t want a small business, they wanted scale and to make a fortune, so they went on a marketing spree and got all the mug punters they could. This influx in customers also probably showed a weakness in the system as bookmakers stopped allowing them to bet, if a customer couldn’t get a bet matched then what was the point of this broker? I’m sure the smart (cough) people at Betbutler then convened a meeting and tried to figure out how they could make money. One smart cookie (double cough) saw that most of their players lost money to the books and in a stroke of genius (triple cough) said “Why don’t we just take the bets ourselves, simple, we will make a fortune”. I think this is when BetButler decided to become a bookie without any bookmaking experience. Due to their own incompetence they are now in deep debt and are slow paying customers and offering crazy incentives to get more people to deposit.
They recently updated their terms and conditions and removed the following clause:
1.3 Any monies deposited with us are protected in the event of our insolvency by virtue of such monies being held by our bank in designated client accounts separately from our own accounts. Any monies deposited with us in your account shall not bear any interest.
This means that your money used to be in a ring fenced account. If betbutler the entity went down your money was still safe. They could not use your money to pay their staff, liabilities and so on. They have now taken this away and can use your money to pay themselves, their debts, their marketing budget and so on. I really have no idea how the Gambling commission have allowed this to happen.
They have also started offering crazy bonuses and odds that are out of line with the market. I personally do not see them lasting out the world cup, especially if England win (hahahahaha, no chance of that). Once again, this is all hearsay from what I have been told personally, seen on twitter and on many forums. My advice is to always be safe in these situations and get your money out asap. You need to be vigilant with online bookmakers. Sadly the regulators do nothing at all apart from take fees to give them a license that is pretty much worthless.