Beware Sportbook Review, great article. Betislands

I never play offshore as I have a reliable local, but I feel for the folks who lost money on Betislands.    I recently came across a great article about Sportbook Review related to Betislands.    It's a caveat for people and hope its educational.

SBR (SportsbookReview.com) went deep into damage control yesterday as it was revealed BetIslands.ag was closing, stealing all customer funds in the process. BetIslands was a sportsbook essentially developed through the SBR brand. SBR helped promote contests, giveaways, and extremely favorable coverage on its forums and news wire to help build BetIslands. It has been estimated over 350 customers lost a total of $1.5 million in this scandal, a vast majority of those customers coming from SBR.

SBR’s response has been discouraging to most of these users. SBR’s Bill Dozer says the clients bear the bulk of the blame: “A book sponsoring the forum is not a guarantee. Everything on the site, including the posters poll and discussions, is information for users to make their own decisions.”

SBR has repeatedly refused to point out who it is that provided the financial backing for BetIslands, despite the fact that strong ownership was the reason for BI’s miraculous rise in SBR’s ratings. BI went from an ungraded sportsbook to a B rating (upper 10% of all sportsbooks according to SBR’s grading scale) in just over a year. “The owners of books aren’t always public and it’s not up to us to make it so,” said Dozer.

 
Reaction from its posters has been sharp:

 

“I thought SBR was providing transparency, reliable reviews, and disputing claims as well. Turns out their business model is providing a captive audience for the books, marketing/touting to said audience, and profiting from their relationship w/ the books.”

“SBR abused their power to lead everyone to the slaughter, and now turns their head away from people who lost 1.5 millions combined.”

“I spent the last few years criticizing Covers, which is obviously a very crooked site. Now it turns out SBR is on the same level. I was completely fooled.”

 
SBR is in no danger of going out of business like its failed business partner. They have, however, been exposed. Once seen as a light shining on the cockroaches in the online gambling industry, they are now shown to have been a cockroach all along. That sort of reputation is hard to erase.

Good stuff.  I'm guessing it was more than 350 customers...

BetIslands Sheet

Who would leak that database/spreadsheet?

this guys going to be in a world of hurt.

im sure there are a more than a few guys who got screwed that are going to go into a break garbage first ask questions later mode.

 

 

Well there is hope. Little but hope. Ryan is trying his ass off to find solutions. It doesn't look good but that's all you can ask of a guy whose gm and financial backer up and left him. Interesting to see if anybody will help. It would be a huge black eye to OS gaming.

"Ryan is trying his behind off to find solutions"  BS PGA, what do you know he has done, other than answer an email?  And NOW he has now shut down that email.  Done.  He and his scum that stole from us, are hiding and living up life, with no accountability,  How good is that!  I hope hope Karma finds all these crooks. For the first time in my life I was victim of a scam that took me for 1,100.00.  I wish severe pain for all of them, I cannot help it. 

It's funny how often SBR admins/mods reference the "poster poll"...

Maybe SBR knew BI was done so they whipped up a poll to try and garner other backing for BI, other than them just shilling.

Once they had a bunch of members voting and touting BI as legit, they could take some heat off their own back by saying "hey, everyone thought they were legit! Not just us"

A small theory, and rather irrelevant now, but still just more wood to the fire.

If I had lost a significant amount of money from BI, I'd be flying to Costa Rica to loot their offices for everything they own. I would then burn down the building and go after the owners who are easy to find in CR.

In fact, maybe I would drop some bomb threats on their children's school.

See how they like getting fukked with.