Professional bookmakers may be operating on betting exchange sites.

Following the announcement from Betfair that it intends to launch a flotation reputedly worth more than £1 billion the Horserace betting levy board has been approached by the industry to chase a better contribution to the sport. Onlinecasino.ie has learned also that the UK Inland Revenue may be monitoring  Betfairs clients as it believes that some may be professional bookmakers trying to avoid tax which could also contribute 10% of their gross profits to the horseracing levy to fund the industry and even Betfairs own survey suggests that over 15% of its clients use the exchange as a primary source of income. The betting exchange has paid over £6 million last year representing 10% of gross profit from commissions from UK horse racing bets and a voluntary sum of more than £1 million to represent profits from overseas customers betting on UK horse racing but the industry claims that users should be paying up to £24 million and William Hill even suggests that they could be underpaying  the industry by more than £30 million per year. Whatever the numbers are, it seems clear that if you use the services of a betting exchange thinking that you are betting against another member of the public you could well be up against a professional or even a fully fledged bookmaker so tread with caution. In its defence Betfair states that the treasury did do a study of the customers in 2004 and 2005 which resulted in them stating that while “some users do bet in high volume, there is not sufficient evidence to characterise these users as running a business as opposed to merely being high volume gamblers”. From onlinecasino.ie we would comments that this is 6 years ago and anyway, when does a high volume gambler become a bookmaker?