MyStake Casino - Player used his brother's payment card without permission.

Hello,

I am here to dispute £2800 in deposits that has illegally been taken from my account.

My card has been used to make several deposits to this casino without my knowledge and whats worse is that the casino has not requested any form of identification verification.

I have contacted the bank and they requested me to contact the merchant. When reaching out the casino i have been forward to an email address with no response.

I have attached all the evidence below and I kindly ask for this not to be published online as it contains sensibly information.

what i fail to understand is how can my brother gamble in my name and they have not asked for any identification which he does not have. Secondly, he has had a gambling problem for a while and we have registered him on to all the blocking services like gamstop so how have they let him gamble? This all feels very illegal and I have been advised by my bank to resolve this with the merchant (the casino) before i raise a fraudulent transaction disputes. the casino is now unresponsive and won’t speak further via live chat.

i kindly ask for your assistance in recovering my money.

Dear phoenixtrade,

Thank you very much for submitting this complaint. I'm sorry to hear about your issue. I have checked the casino's Terms and Conditions, and this is what I found:

11. Depositing

The Company does not accept third party payments. You must make deposits only from a bank account, bank cards, e-wallets or other payment methods that are registered in your own name. If we determine during the security checks that you have violated this condition, your winnings will be confiscated and the original deposit will be returned to the owner of the payment account. The Company is not responsible for the lost funds deposited from third party accounts.

Technically, it is very difficult to check who’s the owner of the payment method at the depositing stage. This can be checked only during the account verification, which is usually done when a withdrawal is requested. Therefore, it is a player’s responsibility to use allowed payment methods only.

Could you please tell me if you also have an account in this casino? What kind of payment method has been used to deposit funds into your brother's casino account?

Regarding your brother's gambling problem, kindly bear in mind that MyStake Casino does not operate under the UK license. This means that the casino has no access to GAMSTOP.

I hope we will be able to help you resolve this issue as soon as possible. Thank you in advance for your reply.

Best regards

Veronika

Hi , thanks for the quick reply.

I want to firstly say thank you for having this platform, I don’t really know much about online gambling and the resources available but i’m glad i came across this website.

Just to provide a bit of context, a year ago I became aware of my brother’s problem from family members. I never knew he gambled before this as we were never brought up with anyone that gambled. He had eventually confessed to the large amounts of debts he had accumulated and the numerous lies he had told. He was facing severe depression and turned to me for support.

i had enrolled him to a therapist and I believe he was doing something similar to AA meetings, maybe gamble’s anonymous i think it’s called or something along them lines.

I thought that it had finally come to an end as after a few months he had told myself and my family that he had a gamstop ban in place and also he was told by his therapist or sponsor or someone that he was no longer able to handle money and that he had to nominate someone to look after his money. Apparently this is part of the 12 steps or something along the lines but it made sense, if he didn’t have a card and online banking then quite literally he can’t do any betting online. So it’s been about 6 months now where i have looked after his money, his wages come in to my bank account and if he needs any cash or make payments, he asks me and i do them on his behalf.

At this point, I was finally satisfied that his gambling problem had all been resolved and i was happy with the progress he had made.

Approximately 3 months ago he was made redundant and has been unemployed since. I had tried to help him get back on his feet but I noticed his depressed attitude come back but didn’t really bring this up.

Apologies for the long back story but i hope this helps all parties understand the situation. Now here’s the issue, over the past month there has been multiple £200-300 transactions to different companies. This didn’t raise any flags and i did not notice this as my business cashflows run through the cards he had used. Even the bank did not initially raise these. However, yesterday i was called by the bank informing me that they had noticed some suspicious activities and asked me to confirm. I did not recognise these charges.

i then went home and asked the family if anyone had used my card for these transactions. At first my brother did not admit anything but after seeing me stressed out, he came clean and explained everything.

i then updated the bank and they told me to try to resolve this with the merchants themselves. Now the funny thing is, all these transactions that he had made to the casino show up in my bank as legitimate business under different business names hence why no suspicious activity was detected.

i have emailed the casino and also raised this complaint here. I hope we can all get this resolved and refunded. I was also shocked that the casino approved so many deposits without any id confirmation. The attachment is there terms and conditions where it explicitly states that id is verified upon account creation which has not been done, which is shocking and i am only just learning now about these different gambling laws for different areas, I thought gamstop was just a whole internet block on gambling sites.

regardless, I’m now stuck in the middle of this as a victim with my business savings lost to fraud and having to take time out of my busy life to fix these. I am angry, shocked, upset and so much more. I’ve never felt this much emotions before.

I have attached the kyc section from their terms and conditions on the website. I’m still confused as to how this whole thing could happen in the first place. The terms and conditions on the site states, "When you sign up for an account at MyStake, you will be required to submit various forms of identification and proof of address". I’m sorry, I don’t understand how such an important aspect of kyc has been ignored and therefore allowing for the facilitation of fraud. 

I sincerely apologize, but I must concur that it is your duty to ensure that your payment methods remain inaccessible to any third parties. If your brother utilized your card without your permission, I would advise you to contact your bank and resolve the matter with their assistance. However, since you willingly shared your card with your brother, I am not sure the bank will be able to help you.

Due to the aforementioned reasons, this complaint will now be rejected. Thank you for your understanding, I am sorry we could not be of more help on this occasion. Please do not hesitate to contact us if you run into any issues with this or any other casino in the future.