BitcoinSports.eu (Closed/Scam)
In February 2013, BitcoinSports.eu announced that they were live and on the market, and had the most selections of any Bitcoin sportsbook, that was currently on the market. The selection provided at BitcoinSports.eu was indeed one of the largest of any of the books you could deposit Bitcoin at. They provided many of the popular American and European sports, along with a wide variety of side bets, as well. They were one of the first books to offer a variety of prop bets, along with individual quarter and half bets. They also were able to provide players with many Asian handicap selections as well, further strengthening their presence in the Bitcoin sportsbook realm.
When BitcoinSports first established itself as a presence within the Bitcoin sportsbook community, it used a method that is now all but extinct, to deal with processing deposits and withdrawals. In order for a player to bet on a particular bet slip, a player would send the amount they wanted to wager, to a unique, one time use, Bitcoin address from their address. The only way to be paid out was through the originating sender’s address, meaning if the player was not able to receive funds to that address, there was no way of the player being paid out. While few people ever ran into this issue, due to BitcoinSports maintaining the “no account” methodology, some players new to Bitcoin, lost out on payouts, due to this method, and never recovered their winnings. BitcoinSports also was reported to have grading issues when it came to larger bets being placed. More than a handful of players, who all placed large bets (.5btc or higher), made complaints about bets not being accepted, because they were told that their bet had not been placed on time. All of these people, coincidentally, had won the bets in question, but were refunded only the wager amount.
As BitcoinSports started running into more user complaints and problems in August/September 2013, they raised the maximum bet, on some major sports, from 2.5btc to an astounding 7.5btc. Undoubtedly, that is when the problems seemed to escalate quickly. A short time after the maximum bets had been raised, the complaints of slow payouts and no payouts began to rise substantially. Claims of 30 to 50 and even 100btc payouts not being received, were coming in daily through various forums. After a few months of ignoring player’s payout questions and concerns, BitcoinSports released this statement on December 20, 2013:
“We realize many of you are panicking and I am here to update everyone on the current status of payouts and hopefully ease some tensions.
As you know, about one month we realized investments were calculating the wrong profit amounts. While fixing this issue over the next two weeks, the large number of cash out requests while this was on going quickly tapped out the small amount of BTC kept in our hot wallets.
What you do not know, is when we went to recover the majority of site funds from the thousands of addresses in cold storage, we were unable to recover the wallet files. In hindsight, it was a bad idea to not let everyone know about this at the time, but we did not want everyone to think their BTC was gone forever.
Over the past few weeks we worked on recovering the wallets hoping that this problem could resolve itself quickly. Days and weeks went by and we were still unsuccessful and users became much more impatient waiting for their payouts. However, I am happy to announce that we have now recovered one wallet, and it looks like we will be able to recover all of them.
Payouts will now be resuming and as more BTC is recovered all pending bets and investments will be sent out. We will be going through the list of missing payouts, or you can contact us with the info and we will make sure it is processed asap.
BitcoinSports never was, is, or ever will be a scam. We will never run with your funds. We would not continue to update everyone if we did not have every intention of making good. We will continue to keep everyone updated about this at a much more frequent rate. We apologize for the lack of communication, it has been a stressful time for our users and our staff while we resolved this and we thank you for your patience.”
