Sportbet Exec Testifies Before Australian Inquiry

Earlier this week, Sportbet Chief Executive Cormac Barry testified before an Australian Federal Inquiry, where he argued that online based gambling companies can better police problem gambler than land based establishments.

Making his stand in front of the federal politicians, Berry testified that third party analytic software can help minimize problem gambling, which gives online based companies and edge over land based operations.

"There are occasions where people will try and open a second or third account to try and get more money on - customers have limits on how much they can bet on each selection - so we run real-time matching software that will pick out common characteristics with similar accounts and that will flag an alert to our fraud team," he said.

"The same would apply with people who have self-excluded - if they try to open a new account with the same email address or phone number or used a different address, the software would pick it up and the account would be suspended by the fraud team.

"The efforts that have been made by the online gambling industry are considerably more sophisticated than other areas of the industry."

Barry did state that the current regulations, which take ninety days for customers to be verified, could be improved. However, the Sportbet executive said that a proposed idea of making gamblers provide a 100 point identification before being allowed to register an online account would be too difficult for the industry to meet as a whole.

"A barrier of that level would be very onerous and would only serve to drive customers to offshore sites that do not have that level of regulation," he said.

"The key thing when we are looking at regulation is to strike a balance and allow the business to operate and have processes that protect the customer - whether they are minors or responsible gamblers."

Barry also stated that according to research by the Queensland Government, there is no evidence available to suggest that gambling addiction has increased since the online gambling industry took hold in Australia in 2001.

Barry revealed that 900 of Sportbet's 700,000 customers have used self-exclusion software, and that 1,600 have set voluntary deposit limits. 95% of Sportbet's customers are based in Australia.