Honeytrap gubbings

I just thought I’d share with you something interesting when I was looking to extract as much profit as I could from a free £25 bonus from Racebets…

Of course, the first thing I did when getting the notification of the free bonus was to fire up OddsMonkey to find a nice close match with high-ish odds. I thought my luck was in when a few matches close to 100% were returned, however when I attempted to place the bet, Racebets took an age to process before telling me the odds had changed.

This happened 5 or 6 times before I then received the dreaded gubbing email (all this took roughly 10 mins) and I was immediately restricted to SP bets only.

It seems to me that Racebets (and perhaps other bookies too) are publishing honeytrap prices on selected runners during the day and will use this to detect match bettors.

So perhaps don’t always go for the highest % rating every time. And try to avoid the honey.

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John W
4

April 27, 2016 at 5:24 pm

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cbates60 0 April 28, 2016 at 3:54 am

Racebets run a tracker in the background which snoops on your other web activity. They’ll have seen you were using OddsMonkey so gubbed you.

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FoG_BLoG 60 April 28, 2016 at 7:47 am

Is that not illegal? Invasion of privacy?

Can you not land them in a lot of trouble if you can prove that?

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Tony 14 April 28, 2016 at 7:52 am

No, as your acceptance of it will be buried away in their T&Cs at the time of sign up, FoG.

Shady, yes. Illegal, unfortunately not 🙁

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John W 4 April 28, 2016 at 8:11 am

I very much doubt that a website can detect or snoop on a what other sites are open in different browser tabs, since they’re sandboxed environments. Imagine what would happen to online banking if that were the case?

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steveo 4 April 28, 2016 at 8:55 am

Unless you’re running incognito mode they can read the cookies left by the other sites. Amazon and Google both make good money from this.

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Chris 23 April 28, 2016 at 10:08 am

I tried racebets as an experiment and used incognito mode on Google Chrome with iesnare blocked on my flash settings.

Signed up and placed a £50 bet on a horse in the space of about 30 minutes.

The following day I went to use my £50 bonus and found I was restricted to stakes of £19.10 and no fixed odds so all my bets were on SP odds. This was all rather annoying as my first £19.10 bet won so it took me an age playing through the whole bonus and it was tricky second guessing last minute SPs.

Anyway, I can only deduce from all this that racebets either cross reference accounts against a sister company if they have one or they detect iesnare is blocked and immediately red flag that for their trading team. It all happened so quickly.

Bit of a shame as they offer good fixed odds and promotions looked decent too. Oh well, still think I took about £35 from my bonus.

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Dave_Jones 10 April 28, 2016 at 10:12 am

Im sure I have read over on the MSE forum that there are one or two bookies that wont even let you open an account with them if you have iesnare blocked.

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FoG_BLoG 60 April 28, 2016 at 10:29 am

I agree with John. There could be huge consequences for online banking if companies are allowed to spy on your online activity outside their own website.

It doesn’t really matter what you agree to in the terms and conditions, if its illegal they can’t enforce it.

I know websites can leave a trail of cookies which is fair enough and if you are sloppy enough or don’t care enough to leave them around then that’s one thing, every website has a warning now a days that they are going to store cookies.

But to install spyware like iesnare. It can’t be right.

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Dave_Jones 10 April 28, 2016 at 10:57 am

I agree with you FoG_GLog it doesn’t seem right, but this software has been used by bookies for many years now. I am pretty sure that the books would have had their legal people look into what they are doing and that they are confident they would win any case if someone tried to take them to court over the use of this software.

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Dave_Jones 10 April 28, 2016 at 10:59 am

I think I have read somewhere that they can justify the use of this software by saying it helps them guard against money laundering, once politicians see that defence they go all quiet because they don’t want to be accused of helping crooks to launder money.

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steveo 4 April 28, 2016 at 11:57 am

So much for that idea, IeSnare pops up on the Chromebook too.

Any ideas how to test it on Android?

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beh 12 April 28, 2016 at 12:17 pm

As John suggests, it’s not possible for sites snoop on other tabs/pages you have open.

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steveo 4 April 28, 2016 at 12:22 pm

Runs on Android as ReputationManager.

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steveo 4 April 28, 2016 at 12:22 pm

As John suggests, it’s not possible for sites snoop on other tabs/pages you have open.

No, but they can read cookies left by other sites.

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beh 12 April 28, 2016 at 1:08 pm

Unless oddsmonkey are also in on it, then it seems unlikely. Cookies tend to be only accessible by the same-origin (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Same-origin_policy), otherwise the internet would be a security nightmare.

It seems more likely that people are simply clicking affiliate links from oddsmonkey or other matched betting sites.

On a similar note I recommend that everyone should install uBlock origin and the flashcontrol browser extensions.

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