Unusual calculation of loss at Tonybet.co.uk; please bear in mind when setting your loss limits

[donaghga]

Hello, fellow AG members,

I have just had an odd experience at TonyBet.co.uk which I am surprised not to have seen reported by any other player  and so I thought I would run it by everyone here to see if my experience was unusual.  It is not a complaint about the casino: I think that they have a great platform, but they do seem to have a unique and interesting way of applying loss limits.

I opened an account at tonybet.co.uk a few days ago and set a monthly loss limit of £1000 and a monthly deposit limit of £1500.  I made a cautious initial deposit of £15, so I could have a low-risk poke around at their games.  I played this through on a few slot titles and lost it.  The next day, I deposited £200 and began playing on some of my favourite slots.  Before long I had got my balance up to £1200.  Yay for me!  I submitted a withdrawal request for £1,000 and carried on playing with the remaining £200.  After another couple of hours, my balance had reached over £615.  I tried  to play a £4 spin on a game from Elk Studios and received a message saying that the bet could not be placed, because I had reached one of my limits.

I checked their the Responsible Gambling tab on my account page.  This does not show the value of the limit that is currently set, but it does show the remaining amount I could lose before hitting each limit and, sure enough, under the loss limit tab it said that I had just £3.77 remaining before I would hit my limit, which would reset in just under 1 month's time.  The description of Loss Limit on that same tab states: “"Loss limit is calculated by taking all your spends on gambling minus the winnings,” which I consider to be pretty accurate description of what most people would think of as “loss”.  Under that description, however, I was £1400 in profit after these 2 sessions of play and I would have to lose £2,400 before I would hit my loss limit, not just the £3.77 that the casino had calculated.  I contacted their live chat support to report the issue.

In that initial support contact, and in further communications over the next couple of days with 3 further support staff at TonyBet.co.uk by chat or email, I received the same explanation:  that the "loss limit on our platform is calculated as wagering,” and if you have “a loss limit of 100 GBP and will place bets of a total of 100 GBP, you would hit the loss limits threshold”; they maintained that the casino’s calculation of my loss is therefore correct, since I had wagered £3.77 less than my £1000 limit.  This means that 4 different support representatives have each confirmed that TonyBet calculate loss simply by totalling the amounts that you have wagered; any winnings/returns from those wagers are not considered.  Wagered = Lost, irrespective of the actual outcome.  

Things got even stranger than that.  Tonybet.co.uk also has a tab in the RG pages of my account titled “Spend (Wagering) Limit”.  The definition given there says “This option allows you to set the limit on the amount you can wager per selected time period.”  Again, this sounds like a pretty good description of a spend or wagering limit.  It also matches the description that 4 support representatives just gave me for loss limit.  I asked a couple of the agents to explain the difference between loss limits and spend limits.  Both of them replied giving the exact descriptions I quoted above from the RG page, even though this contradicted the explanation of loss limit that they had each given me moments before.  Believing that I was making some progress, I asked each of these 2 representatives to confirm the total value of my deposits (£215), the total amount I had withdrawn (£1000) and my current balance (£615) and the level of my loss limit (£1000).  Both agents confirmed all 4 numbers.  I then asked that they use those number to calculate how much I had lost and they both responded in the same bizarre way: they said that they are not able to give out such personal information via chat and if I wanted to see those numbers, I would have to raise a Data Subject Access Request under GDPR and wait until up to 1 month for the casino to deliver the data, as prescribed by the legislation.  They each then appeared to be in a rush to end the chat.

At this point, I daresay that I have stretched the credulity of the AG moderators, who assume that I must be mistaken or lying, but I have the chat transcripts & emails for each interaction, which proceeded exactly as I have describe above.  I will happily provide these.

I emphasise again that I did not really want to raise this as a complaint, because I have otherwise had a very positive experience on this casino: they have a pretty great offering, and I am obviously delighted to have such a win on my first real  session of play on their site.  I also appreciated their insistence on up-front ID verification before I was able to gamble, as it meant that there were less hoops to jump through when i came to make my first withdrawal.  It just struck me as odd that I could find no mention of this bizarre treatment of losses/loss limits anywhere online and I wanted to see whether my experience was typical.  I also thought that other new users to Tonybet.co.uk should be made aware of the unusual methodology for calculating loss and should take this into account when deciding what loss limits to set for themselves.