I guess everyone is aware of the Bitcasino incident, which was also discussed afterwards in
this thread. This is a topic that I thought about a lot in the past and which is super interesting, with even philosophical tendencies. And I guess it's a hot topic, with lots of different opinions and emotions.
I will stick with exploiting vs scamming here to make it easier. There is probably a fine line between these two phrases, but there is also exploiting and exploiting, scamming and scamming.
1) Lets start with a simple example, a football match, which is offered by every bookmaker you can imagine. There is breaking news, that team A will miss a lot of their players due to a flu. Odds are dropping like crazy in all bookmakers, but there is one bookmaker that is slow and has bad software. While all bookmakers only offer 1.40-ish for team B anymore, that bookmaker still has the initial 2.00 for them. Is it ok to bet on this 2.00 ? What if a bookmaker is constantly slow with adjusting odds and you could regularly do it ? Not for 2.00 -> 1.40, but maybe 2.00 -> 1.80.
2) By accident you discover that a bookmaker allows to parlay 1X2 and Asian Handicap market, which is of course a software issue. So you could parlay home win with AHC -0.5 for all kind of matches, which will give you good value odds. Is it ok to parlay these two dependant bets ?
3) This is the quote from user
LAngel from that thread above (can't quote properly, because thread is locked)
there was a cheat where if you activate bonus bet, and spin until you get the 5-hit fish bonus, and immediately restart the game before stopping the symbol selector whee, your session will continue as if you had the bonus bet on (extra bonus chance) but not have to pay double for spins anymore that entire session.
Is it ok to take advantage of this software issue in general ? For $20 ? For $500k ? (Leave aside the fact, that LAngel played with "cheated" money).
4) Lets say I have a trading bot (in betting or crypto exchange) and this bot goes wild due to misprogramming and I lose loads of money. Are all these users filling my orders scammers, when it's obvious that these prices are wrong ?
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What of the above is an exploit and what is a scam ? Where does an exploit start and a scam begin ? Are you clever or a cheater when doing this ? Is it more ok to do it for $10 than for $10,000 or $1.5mln like LAngel did ? Is it more ok to do it with a supposedly rich casino/bookmaker ?
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And what about fixed matches ? These matches do exist, every day there is match fixing, but most of the time we gladly don't know or aren't aware. If you (get to) know about a fixed match and bet on it, does that make you a scammer/cheater ?
Gambling is a (most of the time unfair) competition in the end. Should the "software factor" be completely called immoral and unethical behaviour, when you take advantage of it ? If there is a line for you, where is it ?
There is way more to this discussion imo, but I will leave this as a start and we can work out more as this thread evolves (hopefully).
I made this thread self-moderated, because these kind of threads unfortunately get spammy very fast, with a lot of users just repeating things over and over.