Afflicter All About Accountability

Spadester Responds

While the Afflicter was away on vacation last week, he received an email from a representative of Spadester.com, the gambling web site that we had previously posted about. If you missed it, Spadester has been accused in numerous online forums and blogs of failing to pay out the accounts of players owed hundreds or thousands of dollars, and of demanding personal information from its players that have led some to speculate that Spadester is selling data to identity thieves.

The Spadester rep, who identified himself as Neal Holdsworth, said that the company pays out “100% of the winnings to 100% of our players.”

Holdsworth said that the total number of dissatisfied customers who are posting comments about Spadester are fewer than 12 and that the site has more than 400,000 registered users.

Half of those 12 are fraudsters themselves, Holdsworth claims. He accuses Spadester’s critics of trying to extort money from the company with threats that they would flood the Internet with negative comments about Spadester.

Holdsworth also accuses Spadester’s competitors of participating in the smearing.

Afflicter has no way of confirming whose allegations are true. But we’ll continue to do what little gambling we do ourselves offline, in the state of Nevada, where casino operators are inspected by state regulators. That way, we can at least be reasonably sure that we’re losing a game that isn’t rigged.