If anyone knows DJSunset, you will know his background and he is a smart, big winner. That post however is just drivel to and seems a good way to mention "a new exchange" and slag betfair off, which happens to be a new exchanges major market rival.

Subtle spam.

I will accept on the surface that post could be construed like that, but I said "exchange" and not "betting exchange" for a reason.  Its not a betting exchange , and its not a rival to BF.  For the sake of clearing up your (incorrrect) accusation, I will apologise for being slightly mischievous by using the word exchange .  The thoughts on any exchange not profiting from grimming scams are genuinely what I believe, and I would say and think exactly the same thing if it was wbx or betdaq.  

given the recent case in the media of http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/10/man-found-guilty-after-twitter-joke-about-blowing-up-an-airport/ , i don't think stuff like this looks particularly clever.

Someone must know where he lives?  Tell ya what, Ill give an extra £100 into the pool if somone takes a nice big cricket bat and make sure he sucks his food through a straw for the rest of his days....  That would bring a big smile to my face....

------------------

i'm in the city tomorrow, and part of hopefully a new exchange being set up.  its going to be an interesting day .  i know i have many detractors, and many people who try to shout down my opinion (same as happened to arbboy on here?), but tonight i have felt more and more uncomfortable about hearing of this case.  i spoke to blatch today and find it appalling that after a number of inter-account money dumps, probably breaking money laundering rules, and a seeming £120,000 grimming scheme, the total input so far from betfair has apparently been a phone call to say "some people have been trying to log into your account/guess your password".  if that is true, then seriously what on earth is going on?

Imagine you are a ten year old kid, and your twin brother smashes your piggy bank, and takes all the 2p coins to the local fair.  At the fair is one of those 2p machines, where you put your money in at the top, and hope that when it lands, it pushes lots of other 2p’s on the edge of the ledge in front of you, down into the ‘collect’ slot.  

Those machines work, by not having many 2p’s on the ledge in front of you to start with, and despite having some payouts over the day, at the end of the day, there will be a build up of 2p’s.  
The money your twin brother stole from you will end up sat there, and at the end of the day, the machine owner will collect maybe 30 to 40% of the 2p’s, so that the next day the process can start up all over again.  
The thing is in this case, there is £120,000 of money that (seems) to have been lost.  There is clear evidence with the paper trail of where much of this originally went, and about 8k paid in commission (apparently) on the bets on this account which actually won.  There will also have been a similar amount of commission paid by the winning parties on the other side to Blatch’s losing bets.

I was in a pub many years ago with someone who was very well connected, who said he knew that the ratio of money paid out to winners on winning accounts by betfair, was about equal at the time to the amount of commission betfair managed to rake in.  So for every £120,000 deposited, if that still held true, the exchange would get 60k, and 60k would go to shrewd accounts.  Blatch’s bets may have generated around 16 to 20k of initial commission, but that money he lost to other accounts will also have been shuttled backwards and forwards, and re-raked many times.  

The 120k has been lost.  A fair estimate would be that about 60k of it will in the end end up in BF coffers (assuming all of it was lost on BF).   My point is that there is a responsibility of the exchange, especially given that the money-laundering inter-account dumping seems to have been freely and repeatedly bypassed, to look after the welfare of the community.  Almost nobody else on this thread has suggested that BF are in part at fault, for allowing the Blatch accounts to keep trading without ever getting a warning about breaking money laundering rules.  If BF had been following money-laundering regulations, a significant part of the pot would not have been continued to be gambled and lost.  In the end how much money was lost into the pot after money laundering regs were broken?  Do BF have a vested interest, and have they profited, by ignoring requirements to not allow precisely the kind of behaviour which Blatch did actually engage in?  Would the 120k of deposits been as badly depleted had BF stopped the trading?  My guess is that he would have switched onto other exchanges, websites, casinos or whatever, and lost the money elsewhere, but the fact is, BF have profited from the misery of the 120k investors, by not enforcing money laundering regs.  Is that not poor form?

BF have probably benefitted by about 60k from this scam.  Its a horrible nasty story, which brings exchanges and the gambling community into disrepute.  Is it any wonder why countries like Holland ban BF from operating there, after money-laundering regulations are treated as a bit of a joke?  Why is BF’s first and only call to Blatch to warn him about multiple people trying to guess his password and log in on his account, and not one person at BF has called him to ask what the hell is going on?  This is not organising a pishup in a brewery, this is about a genuine responsibility to protect people who are getting conned, and protecting the exchange itself from fraudulent activity.  It would seem reasonable to have expected them to get on top of a £120,000 scam facilitated by BF, and to get on top of it quickly.  Again, it seems that as the victims aren’t BF themselves, its just punters’ money, then its tough, and BF ends up trousering about 16k to 20k of commission directly, and probably about 60k overall of the victims’ funds.   Is this really acceptable?   I don’t think it is, but then again, perhaps i’m in a minority.  Maybe they could put a little motto hanging over the front of BF H.Q. in Hammersmith, saying “who doesn’t care, wins”.   60 large as well 

Just like those 2p’s are sat there in the machine, 60k of that 120k is also sat there in BF coffers.  If I owned the 2p machine, and had a credible story told to me how one kid had stolen the others money, and put it in there, I’d give that kid the money back if I had the chance.   If Blatch had taken a sawn-off shotgun into the local building society, nicked 10k, and then spaffed it away in a couple of days playing BF games/meteors or whatever, then if BF became conscious of where the 10k had come from later in the week, if it was sat in there accounts, would it not make sense to return it?  Is BF a place where the victims of crime/con-merchants etcetera, can see their money dumped and ringfenced away from them?

If you provide these markets, if you don’t enforce money laundering regulations, if you pocket 20k in commission from these bets, and then probably benefit to the tune of another 40k as this money is then recycled between other customers, then given that there are people seriously hurt by this, its time to speak to Blatch, get a complete list of who is owed what, and return that 20k proportionately as 16.66pence in the pound, to people who have seen their money smashed away.  It just isn’t fair for Bet-fair to have made 20k minimum out of Blatch’s victims, and BF should be trying to look for a way to end up having lost nothing through this, but also having not made a £20,000 minimum killing on it.  Otherwise there is an incentive in the future to pressure whoever is supposed to be in charge of upholding money-laundering regulations, to allow dodgy accounts to keep betting.  I doubt that is what happened here, my guess is just sheer incompetence from whoever was supposed to spot the money-dumping between accounts, but if it kept happening, it wouldn’t be a stretch to wonder precisely what orders were being given to the supposed money laundering team.  


Make betting fair.  (You know you want to really,.... )

dj

 

I'd like to see

- Any company that has profited as a result of this (through commission, or any other means) to sort out GreekStein's dad with a couple of nice comps to a sporting event.  The guy sounds fantastic, and it would be nice if there was a small silver lining to come from the cloud of being told your son had just lost you your 5k/summer holiday,  on father's day.

- Blatch voluntarily close any remaining betting accounts he has left open.  (Any bookmaker or exchange that still has his account left open, bearing in mind pretty much all of them will have seen this thread by now, is a King Canute).  The gambling spiralled out of control, and ended up sucking in other people to a downward spiral.  

- Any betting exchange which gained commission from these bets to refund the commission.  Its not fair if 100k is scammed off people, and 80k goes to other gamblers whilst 20k goes in commission to the exchanges.  I obviously suspect the vast majority of commission paid is to betfair and not betdaq, wbx or others, but this is dirty money that you are not entitled to.  There is corporate responsibility, and where a massive reported 120k grimming scam has just claimed a large number of victims, its a little tasteless to say "that was great, we made 20 large in commission from those bets".  How bad would it look if the papers reported this, a 120k scam, where 20k of the money ripped off the victims ended up lining the pockets of the providers of these markets which facilitated the grim in the first place.  I would say exactly the same thing about this being dirty money, no matter which exchange had facilitated these bets, and its obvious that if people have been ripped of to the tune of £120,000, you shouldn't be trousering 20k of that.  It isn't money taken off profits, its money that is from a dirty tainted source, that it turns out you never had any right to include in the year's nominal profits.  
 
- Why was there no-one who spotted the money being dumped into one account from another.  If it had happened on just one day, then fair enough, but its unforgiveable it happened on separate occasions.  How many other accounts are freely breaking money-laundering rules, and are any of those accounts creating real victims like this case has?

- The best thing overall would also be if Blatch's family posted on here as independent intermediaries, with a focus on the best possible way to repay investors as much as possible, whilst also protecting Blatch's welfare.  

- As I understand the current situation, no-one from betfair has yet called Blatch to have a chat about the 120k and all these bets.  If this isn't bringing betting exchanges into disrepute, I don't know what is.  Its about time somebody from betfair actually did.

DJSunset has been on betfair for years. He knows how bad the customer service has got recently im sure.

I don't think returning the commish would be a customer service matter, it would be for management to decide.

And they are worse than the CS imo.

yeah, it would definitely be a management decision.  its up to them of course, but if i was them, i'd think the 8k profit was dirty money, and would look to return it.  the goodwill that would generate would be significant.  its up to them of course, perhaps if someone with more weight than lil' ol' me has could give them a nudge, it would be great to hear that GreekStein's old man ended up with say a couple of hundred quid back.

the 5k at 1.01 money transfer won't be returned.  it was a transfer from neil blatchly, to himself.  the only issue with that is why whoever was supposed to be stopping money transfers seemingly failed to do their job, and how many other times they have failed.  

the reported 8k commission on the other hand is from skulduggery and misuse of the exchanges, which in turn provided both the cover story and facilitated (unwittingly) the grimming scam.  there are people suffering out there, and 8k from a 120k pot returned would be a legitimate and honourable course of action.  it is definitely what i would do, and i hope there is enough sympathy for genuine victims of the scam to warrant quietly returning a small part of the money they have lost. it obviously wouldn't be fair if the victims were down 120k from this, whilst an exchange actually profitted to the tune of 8k from neil blatchly's scam.

i haven't got any pro or anti agenda, but i do feel for GreekStein having to tell his dad - on father's day - that he's just lost him a small fortune. 

LOL @ the idea betfair returns the commision, you obviously haven't had much contact with this company have you?

erm,...  i, erm, obviously, can't have done,...

for what its worth if 120k has been fiddled out of people's accounts, if i was betdaq, wbx or whoever, and i'd made say 5 or 6k of commission on a big nasty fiddle like this, i would suspend Blatch's accounts immediately, and ask him to disclose the total pot invested in it, and who the stakeholders were in it percentage-wise.  i would then allocate that 5 or 6k proportionately to the victims, in exchange for them signing forms saying that they weren't allowed to discuss anywhere on forums or with the media that they had been given this rebate.  

it would be a nice gesture, and it would be the correct one. the point of doing it behind the scenes would be a way of avoiding unwittingly displaying culpability or complicity in the grimming, from thick journalists or less cerebrally-gifted bloggers or forum posters.  

Would be a nice gesture if the commission generated by these bets was returned to the victims by whichever exchanges these grimming wagers were placed on.  Whilst that would only be a small part of the 120k, it would be a shame if any companies ended up profiting out of the misery inflicted upon the victims.  

There are a hell of a lot of people reading this thread too.  I had never heard of this forum before this thread was sent to me via facebook today, but each person reading this will have their own pool of online resources.  People should have a trawl through the fora/blogs/websites etc they are familiar with, having a look for anything else like this where there are examples of people (no matter how trusted) asking for money.  This Blatch scam has gone on since 2009, and there will be other examples out there, right now,  of a 'Blatch' or 'footsoldiers' horror story, waiting to yet unravel.  

dj  

The key things now are

1) Checking on the welfare of the people who have lost these amounts.  The link earlier in this thread about another conman said two people tried to commit suicide after their losses, and as a matter of urgency, Blatch should give details of his biggest investors to someone neutral, so they can be checked up on.  Did any of them invest a huge chunk of the 120k, and did any of them invest more than they could afford to lose?

2) Blatch's betting accounts being shut, or at least suspended.  Any bookmaker or exchange that has profitted (unwittingly) from this grimming scam can't allow him to keep on chasing,.. what if there are more investors who he is still in touch with who haven't read these threads?  Is Blatch in control of his gambling sufficiently?  Has he been honest that there is nothing left, or is there still a few grand kicking around somewhere?  If he is not in control, and people are getting hurt, its not unreasonable to expect bookmakers or exchanges to suspend his accounts.  The bad publicity if this does get in the papers will far outweigh the commission generated from his bets with other people's money.

3) Reducing the chances of this happening again in the near and far future.  There have been about 250 to 300 people reading this thread all day, and they would be helping the community by posting links/details to this case far and wide, so that in the future, anyone who reads about this case thinks twice about investing in "risk-free" "better than a bank" scams.  

I've just read the first half of this thread, and the final page.  

Just want to say good luck to GreekStein.  At the end of the day, its a long life for most of us, and your dad will understand.  Nobody has kids without knowing that there will be times when things go wrong.  Something like this will sometimes make the bond stronger between a parent and their kid.  

Its sad to see what has happened here.  The money put into exchanges all originally comes from blood sweat and tears, and the hopes that many investors had of extra money/holidays etcetera would be from winning the money from other punters who would then miss out on those things that they themselves hoped for.

I'd have liked to see the inter-account transfers which Blatch has said he did be cracked down on a bit harder.  I got a phone warning from Betfair many years ago after backing and laying the same selection at the same price (on the same account) on an illiquid market, something I had done for no other reason than boredom to pass 3 or 4 minutes randomly on an afternoon.  I don't see why Blatch didn't get a warning for the two 5k 1.01 transfers in the same day into his personal account.

Arbboy deserves a huge amount of credit, not necessarily for exposing the grim, but for being forthright, honest, and well-informed, and putting up with a lot of nonsense posts.

I don't think Blatch will be able to get that much money back, or even a significant chunk of it.  Sad to see the investors lose, and hopefully it will be a long time before there is another footsoldiers or Blatch investment 'scheme' to make people money.   Good luck to all.