This week two cases stand out in the sportsbook industry, here’s what happened:

– Thousands of Australians will lose $1.5 million after the collapse of ACT-registered SportsAlive, which was placed into liquidation last Thursday despite returning profits of about $5 million last year. Over 100 players have shown interest in joining a class action lawsuit against the ACT Government. ACT Gambling and Racing Commission chairman Malcolm Gray said while complaints about late payments had been made, these had been investigated and resolved. Ask The Bookie will update this case as soon as more information is available.

– Last week we mentioned that thirty VIP Sportsbook players reported being owed $31,153 and that they did not request payment of their account balances before the August 1st deadline imposed by VIP Sportsbook. This week more players have complained and now the amount of money owed by this sportsbook is $42,345.

The VIP Sportsbook manager claims that their office has closed and that there’s no dedicated support team or contacts to field player inquiries. He also stated that the primary reason for shutting the operation down was the difficulty of working with payment processors. He said that no further payouts would be made, so those who did not request payment of their account balances before August 1st will lose their money.

Here at Ask The Bookie we think that the main problem was that VIP Sportsbook should have called and sent emails to alert every player and tell them to request a payout instead of just waiting for them to log in to display the alert, considering that they knew they had a large number of seasonal bettors who would not log in before the deadline they imposed.