Gamblers sue The Netherlands’ Toto for refusing to make full payouts on winning bets
The semi-professional gamblers say the state-owned betting company has refused to pay out most of the winnings due on bets made last year.
The Netherlands.- Four players described as semi-professional gamblers have filed a lawsuit against the state-owned betting operator Toto for not fully paying out on football bets. They say they won close to €26,000 euros on bets on a Danish cup match in August 2022 but that Toto has failed to pay most of it.
The broadcaster NOS has reported that while the average Dutch gambler loses €310 per month, the plaintiffs managed to earn a living by taking advantage of gambling operators’ mistakes, which is what Toto says happened in this case. NOS reports that some operators, including Betcity, have blocked the accounts of the players in question without providing an explanation.
In this case, the players placed bets at Toto retail betting outlets, which include cigar shops and supermarkets permitted to take bets for the operator, to avoid having to provide identification. They placed a series of bets, most of them on first-division club HB Koge to win a Danish Cup match against a second-division side. Toto was offering odds that would pay out six to seven times the stake, which according to the players’ betting receipts would total close to €26,000.
However, Toto argues that the odds offered were clearly a mistake since Koge was in a higher division than the other team and that the players knew the odds were “too good to be true”. As such, it says the winnings should be less.
The players say that the case shows players are treated in an arbitrary way. One of them, Cupido van den Berg, told NOS: “You are simply not allowed to win at these companies.”
A spokesperson for the Dutch gambling regulator KSA told NOS that regulations don’t prohibit companies from limiting the bets of winning players or from excluding them. However, it said it believed it was “undesirable” for operators to be using mechanisms that are intended to protect gambling addicts against winning players.
Dutch government to propose new player protection rules
The Dutch government is to act on the national gambling regulator KSA’s calls for gambling legislation to be updated. The KSA had pushed for legislative changes to improve player protection.
Franc Weerwind, the Netherlands’ minister for legal protection, has confirmed that the government agrees that the current measures are flawed. Responding to questions in parliament, he said the government intends to propose new player protection rules early next year in a bid to improve addiction prevention.
The KSA’s report into online gambling operators’ duty of care identified issues with consistent monitoring. Weerwind told the Dutch parliament that he was committed to amending the current rules early in the year, adding that an evaluation of the Remote Gambling Act in 2024 will also look into the effectiveness of addiction prevention in the law, which came into effect in 2021 and allowed the regulated online gambling market to open in October of that year.
