Many Bettors Frustrated per Illegitimate PPH Sites

When the internet first came many bookmakers in USA decided to take their operations offshore believing that as long as their bets were taking place in jurisdictions that deemed the activity legal, they had nothing to fear from the government. That changed quickly around 2006 when the UIGEA was passed.

After that, most bookmakers remained underground. But some entrepreneurs came out with a new model called pay per head, price per head or PPH that was directed to these underground bookmakers. The PPH model took away a lot of the work from the bookmaker and instead put it in the hands of a PPH provider: Instead of taking a bet from a client, bookmakers would send their clients to a website where they would place the bet.

The PPH provider is usually made up of people with knowledge of sports and betting who would list bet options for the players. The advantage is that the site is available 24/7, has a live agent available for questions and has all the relevant and local games available. Customers place their stakes with the PPH which keeps track of profits and losses in various forms of software. The bookie has full control of his clients, so he can set limits or deny plays from clients.

The evident benefit of this model is that the bookmaker’s name is nowhere out there, the clients can still be gambling online and he simply collects all the winnings without doing much. And all this is done at a cost between $5 and $20 per player (head) per week. The bookmaker's time is consigned to finding new customers as well as paying or collecting.

This solution has been working wonders and many large underground operations have been successful. Nevertheless, success raises competition and many sportsbooks that are PPH operations have appeared, and some are better than others.

Some bookmaking operations look like legitimate sites but usually aren't. Often they are failed former bookies, VIP clerks or previous PPH operators that find a way to get the money from players and if the operation is successful, they will use their winnings to pay the losers. But if they don't limit winning players or book far more than they can pay and lose, they simply walk away. After all, there is no audit trail, no forwarding number and nothing the player can do. They can't go to the country the operation is set up in or even visit the site directly because it never had a real physical location. Also, it seems that most of the PHP providers do not do any background checks on bookmakers as there is no risk to them if the bookmaking operation defaults.

Not all of these PPH operations are thieving places, but many are simply hoping players lose, as they don't have sufficient backing. Unfortunately, some players will take a 150% bonus from a brand new operation with no track record rather than stick with places like Heritage that have all been around over a decade and have a flawless record of paying out.

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