OddsMonkey slips on ASA banana skin

ts betting site OddsMonkey has become the latest gambling related entity to fall foul of the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) over spurious claims made on its website.

The ASA received complaints over a video on the OddsMonkey homepage which claimed that “For years OddsMonkey has helped over 30,000 people earn up to £1,500 per month.”

Responding to the complaints, OddsMonkey provided screenshots from an online message board where they had asked their members to tell them the amounts of money they had earned cumulatively in July 2017.

In these screenshots customer responses ranged from £100 to £5,890 with Odds Monkey claiming that if their members were only prepared to commit to one to two hours of matched betting per day, they would earn less than those who committed five to six hours per day.

OddsMonkey supplied marketing data showing that they had 26,909 customers during the period from 1st June 2016 to 16th August 2017 to further substantiate their claims.

In its ruling, the ASA acknowledged that the OddsMonkey message board comments were from genuine users, however despite this they stated: “Message board comments were not adequate evidence to support the claim, as they only related to earnings in July 2017, and we also had not seen documentary evidence to support their comments.

“We did not consider that the evidence related to the earnings of all its members over a sufficiently long period in order to substantiate the long-term earnings claim.”

The ASA later ruled that the claims made by OddsMonkey were misleading and ordered the site to take down the advertisement unless “they held adequate substantiation”.