New Betfair charge

[Euler]

How long has this been in the T&C's? I just got an email telling me that I will be charge if any of my accounts are inactive for more than a year!!

8) Inactive Account Fees

From 31 December 2010, we will begin charging you* a fee†^ (as indicated in the table below) per calendar month (“Inactive Account Fee”) if:
(a) there has been no log in or log out recorded on your Betfair account for thirteen consecutive months or more (i.e. no “Account Activity”); and
(b) the main licence wallet of your Betfair account± is in credit.

The Inactive Account Fee will be withdrawn from the main licence wallet of your Betfair account (your “Main Wallet”) on a monthly basis to the extent that the Main Wallet remains in credit and only for the period during which there remains no Account Activity after the initial thirteen month period has passed. If the Inactive Account Fee is due to be withdrawn from your account and the balance of your Main Wallet is less than €5 (or equivalent currency), the Inactive Account Fee shall comprise the remaining funds in your Main Wallet.

If at any time you engage in Account Activity after you have been subject to one or more Inactive Account Fee, we will reimburse you on request the amount charged, up to a maximum of six months’ Inactive Account Fee†.

For example: if your account is transacted in EUR, the last time you engaged in Account Activity was 28 February 2010, and your Main Wallet held funds of €25 as at 31 March 2011, then Betfair would charge its first Inactive Account Fee on or around 31 March 2011, and would continue to charge the Inactive Account Fee on a monthly basis thereafter. If you then placed a bet on 15 May 2011 and notified Betfair that you would like to be reimbursed, Betfair would reimburse you the €10 Inactive Account Fee imposed (€5 on 31 March and €5 on 30 April).

*Customers registered in Australia or New Zealand shall not be subject to the Inactive Account Fee. If your country of registration is outside the UK and you hold more than one Betfair account, you will only incur an Inactive Account Fee in respect of one account at any one time (meaning that you will never pay more than one Inactive Account Fee per month).

†If you are VAT registered and require a VAT invoice, this will be available on request from the Betfair Helpdesk.

^All charges quoted are inclusive of VAT.

±Funds in the Australian licence wallet, the Casino wallet and the Exchange Games wallet of your Betfair account shall not be affected by the Inactive Account Fee.

[LeTiss 4pm]

What's the reason behind that then?

I'd be interested to know how many people have died with money in their accounts, but nobody knows the money is sat there

This is a good way for Betfair to permanently hoover up that cash

[CaerMyrddin]

yes it is, speccially considering the government is looking into those funds too. By creating this charge, they'll mop up the cash before the IRS takes it...

[SpikeyBob]

I received an e-mail about this today as well Peter. Don't you just love BetFair, talk about 'Bah Humbug'.

I set up a second account for testing strategies, but never use it as BA only lets me use my main account. I would probably use the test account more if were able to use both accounts on the same monthly BA subscription. Is there a way of doing this?

Cheers

SB

[george]

I was thinking of how many people have money sitting in their betfair account probably millions right ?

that money have not any value to us till the day we withdrawn some, if you think about it all we do is play with numbers, and the most of us we like to have enough sitting there just to feel comfortable while trading, so betfair can use that money in so many ways in order to get some kind of monthly interest and on top of that they trying to find more ways to charge us like premium charges and data request charges.

they are greedy and i hope soon people start using other betting exchanges, i started experiment with betdaq the only minus is that we dont have a reliable trading platform like we have with betangel for betfair hope in time we will

[Euler]

Betfair have often quoted 3 million accounts, but recently stated that only 65k were active and only 85% of those were active in the last 12 months. That leaves 2.95m that the charge could apply to, nice money if you can get it.

[LeTiss 4pm]

Is it just another example of BF trying to stop traders manipulating the markets?

Even though they're only attacking dormant accounts, next step will be people with more than 1 active account

[Euler]

*Customers registered in Australia or New Zealand shall not be subject to the Inactive Account Fee

[rubysglory]

I think it is all part of a bigger conspiracy involving the tracking of IP addresses of accounts being used for money laundering and the like !

rg

[PeterLe]

I've got three in total, I guess I'll just do a quick £2 scalp on a couple of markets..
I didnt get an email? I use two of them regularly, but the third I've not used for many months

I expect that they will be looking at lots of ways in the future to try and squeeze that last little bit out of everyone...I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't increase the PC charge this year...or a super PC charge for high earners, on a sliding scale (banding) like the discount rate is set..ie the more you earn the more you pay..

regards
Peter