Stake.com and underage gambling

Hi all,

I am starting this thread as a mother who has found her son attempting suicide due to his massive loss with the casino stake. My son is only 17 years old and we live in the UK.

He has lost over £7,000 that my husband and myself have been saving for him as a child. He has always taken good care of that money until Stake.com came in to his life.

I’m not somebody that gambles or too familiar with online casinos but after a lot of research i see the Stake.com purposely avoids KYC verification until a customer tries to withdraw a large winning or in my case a child reports the issue to their parents. After days of emailing the casino they are not looking to refund our money despite exploiting my 17 year old child and its crazy how the curaçao antellephone licensing authority doesn’t care about this or how stake is allowed to continue to exploit children.

I would love to know if anybody has had a similar encounter and if anyone could help in regards to this.

If any casino guru staff or other users could shed a light on this it would be very useful. I am a mother of 3 boys and I wouldn’t consider myself to be too tech savvy so all of this is a bit hard for me to comprehend. Thank you

Hi Sophiav,

It's not easy to read such a story.

I would like to get to your kind attention that we found a very similar complaint if not precisely the issue you mentioned, hence it seems we have already clarified in cooperation with the casino.

Frankly, it does not truly matter how old the player is if he decides to provide incorrect information willingly.

Allow me to stress a few key points:

If you do not agree with the decision, you may file an official complaint at the licensing authority of the casino. Although their opinion would be the same.

Please feel free to browse the complaint here.

I'm sorry, but there is nothing we could do. Even players should respect fairness. You can also browse our Fair Gambling Codex to feel better oriented.

Could I ask, how - at 17 years old, in the UK your son is able to buy crypto currencies with a UK bank card?

The exchanges where you buy crypto currency are a lot more strict, and do a lot more checks on being able to buy Crypto. Especially since being in the Uk?

Also, you say you you found your son attempting suicide, is he okay?

I hope you’ve managed to get him sectioned under the mental health act and he gets the full help he needs before being released. Gambling is the most gripping of all addictions since it changes your brain layout. Did he let on you you how long he’d apparently gambolled for?

Hi Radka,

Thanks for the reply, I understand completely that my son is partially to blame here. I see how creating an account with false details is not fair to the casino.

However, what I don’t understand is, if licensed casino’s are required to complete identification checks, then why has stake.com not once asked this. I’ve read on one of the casino guru forums that some casinos only ask for this during withdrawals or after/around £2,500 has been deposited.

But this casino has allowed him to put in his whole savings of over £7,000 and i really find it hard to believe that they had no internal processes to flag something like this.

By letting my son simply sign up and deposit so much money, how are they preventing minors from gambling on their site? Im sure that my son is not the only one doing this, literally any child can sign up on this casino and enter a date of birth showing age to be above 18 and carry on gambling like normal.

Isn’t the identification process in place to essentially omit situations like this from happening. Even then I understand that the casinos might not be able to do the verifications immediately, but i’ve looked the casino statements that my son provided. He’s been on there for a span of 2 months with several deposits I believe it all added up to well over £7,000. Surely at this point, the casino are acting negligently aren’t they? Purposely avoiding any checks to ensure that my son keeps losing his money there, say after a month or after £2,500 in deposits, they had enforced an identity verification, then the sum of deposits would have been a lot less than all of his savings.

Just like there should be fairness to the casino, shouldn’t there be fairness to my son in this situation? Because from what i can see, my sons opened an account with a gambling site with false details which is wrong. But after several deposits and months of being active the casino has never conducted an identification check or an affordability check or limited deposits because they were simply exploiting a minor who didn’t know any better than to keep going back on there losing his money.

Thanks Radka, i know its a lot to read but this has to be one of the worst things that’s happened in our family, thats all the savings i have put aside for him since birth and then to understand that the money is now with an offshore casino who are refusing to acknowledge their mistake is just heartbreaking. If they were licensed in the uk, i could have tried to take the matter to court as i was advised by the UK gambling commission to take the matter to small claims court. But with this casino it seems as though the casino and its regulators are passive and the casino guru platform is all i have to support me or at least question the casino on its practice.

Hi,

thank you for your kind words, hes doing alright now. Going to college and back we’re keeping a very close eye on him and trying our best to keep him in a positive mental space.

In terms of the crypto, im not too familiar with how this all works ill ask him again today when he’s back and updated you.

thanks

You should be begin by questioning how he was able to purchase the crypto currency he was able to deposit in able to play at this crypto casino, since they won’t allow payments directly from a UK bank account.

If your son has been able to buy crypto currencies from an exchange totalling to £7000 without providing KYC or checks of AML, then you’ll have a strong foot to stand on there. With the exchange, not Stake. (Providing of course, you aren’t enabling him purchasing crypto by using your exchange accounts linked with your bank cards to buy it/ since exchanges will only take payments from bank accounts in the name of the exchange account holder though due to the non reversal nature of crypto currencies)

unfortunately, I can only comment on you mentioning "I find it hard to believe he’s able to deposit £7000 over 2 months" that even a deposit in one go of £10,000 all the way up to £25,000 doesn’t trigger any internal warnings within this site…

I believe these casinos with no KYC are the most harmful and damaging thing to have happened to the gambling scene.

I hope your son can answer those missing answers in terms of where the crypto came from, and you can share that answer to here too,

Hi Sophiav,

I forget to mention that not every casino starts with the KYC verification (Know Your Customer) the moment somebody registers on their site. Players can ask for the verification anytime though. In this case, it does not even matter, frankly.

It's common practice that a player is verified when a withdrawal is requested, not sooner.

Another alternative is that KYC is triggered when the first deposit is made, but it's mostly due to the payment verification at this point. When cryptocurrency is used, there is nothing to verify though.

I also agree with StonedTwat regarding the comments on the way your son purchased the cryptocurrency.

This is the crucial part, I'd say.

There's an association helping victims of these unregulated casinos, here's the link, you might try talking to them but i think it's gonna be very hard to get your money back, there's a lot of dirt behind these things.

https://sbgok.org/

How does the organization work? Do they deduct commission from the amount they manage to acquire for you?

Sophia, I'm sorry to hear about your son. Unfortunately, and I say this PO'd, that he is among tens of thousands of under aged kids gambling/gambled on Stake. So for those wondering how? My friend & I collabed on this video explaining just how easy Stakes made it for under aged gamblers. They never had an age verification process, which is highly illegal. Worse, they werent allowed to operate in USA, they bypassed that for having their twitch influencers to use a VPN and theyre all set. Again explained in video. We now live in a dangerous society where the cyber underground world can bypass so many laws. Trust me, when you watch it, will have everyone shaking their heads https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ic7PX3tOTdc

Now Stakes is presently being sued by a former partner for 400 million. I'm reaching out to his representing lawyers tomorrow in hopes of seeing if they, or someone they can refer too, do a class action lawsuit against stakes.