Woman earning $750 a week gambles $3.7M
abc.net.au
abc.net.au
Does anyone have any good answers here?
How do you help the people without the wherewithal - for whatever reason - to understand their actions and the actions of those around them in the bigger picture, while still treating them as discerning adults? I am not sure you can...
What about the responsibility of the house to detect ordinary people gambling way over their means?
Many other industries have KYC regulations (of some kind), but it seems like the gambling industry is excluded.
Jail the addict.
Protect the profits.
Don’t compensate the victim of theft.
That’s a recipe for rinse and repeat ad nauseum.
Some blame can be assigned the business owner. How can you go so many years without a 3rd party audid, or Some kind of second opinion to your finances? Though trust shouldn’t be so harshly criticized.
The casino is in a tough spot. If it returns any money, it sets a precedent that would turn its industry on its head. It’s also not necessarily fair to its investors, and it would be hard to unwind all the hires, raises, and investments that were made with the fraudulently gambled winnings.
It almost feels like a charity should be established and funded by the casino; a vehicle to right wrongs such as these, without admitting fault/setting a precedent. Heck the casino would even get tax write offs for the charitable donations
If you want to make the victim whole, that's what insurance is for.
Mandate that all chips display actual cash value.
Require signed disclosures with big warnings about the risks and costs of gambling, every time chips are purchased, like required on mortgages.
Apply Accredited Investor rules to gambling.
Mandate warning labels like on cigarettes.
> Apply Accredited Investor rules to gambling.
Sorry, you should not need to earn $200k per year or be a millionaire to go blow a few hundred bucks at a casino. That's crazy.
Maybe not fair. But they invested their money into a business whose business model is to rip off its customers. They could have invested in a thousand other businesses that actually produce something useful to the society, yet they chose to put their money into a business which removes clocks on its premises so people would stay longer and gamble more and lose more.
Casinos maybe legally good, but they are ethically/morally bad.
On a related note - I find it funny that I need to be an accredited investor to invest in a huge range of businesses, but I can just walk into a casino and gamble away all my money, even if I am a minimum wage earner. Never understood that part.
What interested me was: republicans are in support of removing accredited investor status making your same argument that it bars the masses from lucrative investments, while democrats fought allowing a test to qualify investors for accredited status, arguing that the masses would expose themselves to too much risk.
Is this a personal liberty vs authoritarian take? Is this a personal liberty vs empathetic (though paternalistic) take? Is this a quiet "let's exploit investors" vs "prevent investor exploitation" take?
For some reason their positions have me stumped.
You're right about the accredited investor double-standard though, hopefully that gets removed soon.
Don't forget that gambling is also highly addictive.
We may not like American football, beauty pageants etc. But at least those are level playing fields and not addictive
With casinos, at least they only lose money and are unlikely to have to live with lifelong injuries.
I wouldn’t have a problem with gambling if the odds are even.
Also, combat sports are not addictive, gambling is.
> Clerke is now in prison and none of her close relatives would talk to ABC Investigations for this story. The closest we can get to understanding her behaviour is through what was said in court, and through Hannah*, a gaming attendant who worked in the club back when Clerke was obsessively playing the poker machines there.
> "She was quiet and pretty much kept to herself. But she was lovely. She would come in at night and would often leave at closing, at 4am," Hannah says.
> "She was one of the big spenders. I was told [by a colleague] she was the number 1 gambler in the club."
> The court heard that a forensic psychologist had found that Clerke suffered from fear and anxiety, and that she played the poker machines to help her cope with her distress.
> As someone who suffered from low self-esteem, Clerke would have appreciated the VIP treatment and attention she received at St Marys Leagues club.
> "Vicki was at the highest level in the rewards program which is called Pink Diamond," says Hannah. "That meant she got VIP service from a personal attendant, free soft drinks and coffee, meals from her rewards points. All those on the top rewards tier are made to feel special."
I used to work next to a company that ran an online gambling site. They were about ten employees, some developers, a few graphic designers and project managers. One of them revealed that almost all their profit came from a dozen whales. One girl who worked there was their chat moderator. Her job was to greet the whales in their virtual lobby, cheer for them when they won and "comfort" them when they lost.
Patrons have to apply for membership.
The club could deduce just from this woman's address that she didn't have $XX million available to her for gambling - if it were even trying 1% to spot problem gamblers.
In the case of St Mary's,
> The not-for-profit community club has over $85 million in net assets.
That's crazy! It is a suburban football club!
Well, clearly, it isn't. Clearly, it is an entirely different form of enterprise, disguised as something it isn't.
Clubs that do this are protected from consequences by governments that won't introduce legislation because of reasons that I can't write without having the resources to defend against a spurious defamation action that would bankrupt me.
Absolutely should not rely on them setting up a "charity".
She wasn’t gambling in a casino. She was gambling in what is essentially a pub that has a large room filled with pokie machines.
This is common across Australia, pubs have dedicated rooms (so called vip rooms) filled with pokie machines as they bring in a lot of money for the owners. Pubs are ripping out dining/general social space and putting in Pokie rooms.
It’s cultural to go have a pint and a bet.
She’s absolutely responsible for stealing but Australia’s obsession with Pokie machines and amount of Pokie machines is also problematic encouraging problem gambling. Pokie machines provide no benefit to anyone except the owners.
Not being Australian born the gambling commercials on tv was also eye opening.
I would prefer to see these sorts of clubs outlawed, and gambling only allowed to take place in licensed casinos, with very strict regulations around checking that the people gambling are doing so with full knowledge and are actually in a position do so...
yeah, she should get a sentence commensurate with financial-crisis-causing wall street bankers. oh wait...
Like what if you could have part of your paycheck automatically sent to an account that your landlord/bank pulls from for your housing, have some put in a savings account that you can only access after x years, some that you can only spend on groceries, etc. Then people who know they have a problem can ensure they don't spend money they need for other things on gambling.
A solution is to have casinos track/report customer spending, if a customer is spending (and losing) very large sums of money (say over 50-100k), they should verify their income.
I help run a small money remittence business and we're legally required to verify the payslips/income of customers who send X amount per fortnight (I forgot the limit as it's been a while since I dealt with compliance) and we send the data to a government body. If a small business can verify income and see where the money is coming from I don't see why casinos can't do the same.
After I wrote this I realised this isn't actually feasible as people can just walk in to casinos without being identified (never been to one). Maybe this needs to change, maybe memberships should be required for entry into casinos, just like you would a gym. It's just crazy to me someone can swindle 3.7m without causing any alarms.
Gambling addiction is real and while it is the responsibility of the person not to defraud others to support their addiction the casino should have picked up on it. Just like you wouldn't expect a bar tender to continue serving someone who is practically on the floor passing out.
"She hid her theft by creating dummy bills for suppliers and paying the money directly into her account."
If I'm reading this correctly, fake bills were created and entered as expenses, which were then paid from the company bank account.
If so, wouldn't the losses have shown up on the income statement? That would mean that the owner had the same amount of money he thought he had, but less than he should have had.
Likely some details are missing from the article.
> Mr Zeuschner has calculated that Clerke would have put a staggering $20 million through the poker machines at St Marys over the 17 years she was stealing money from his business.
Perhaps she was repatriating the winnings, and so the signal of her losses were masked over time.
$3.7m over 17 years = $218,000 per year.
The main damage to the business was the revealing of the fraud and driving away the people who were going to buy it.
Nobody is going to stick around for years waiting for court proceedings to finish up to complete a purchase of a small business - they’ll just find something else.
No company, no matter how small, should only have one person manage the books.