UK betting giant's unlawful marketing kept suicidal gambler hooked
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
I always give them the same answer: no. I don't work for parasites.
I remember the time before the Blair government unwisely deregulated gambling, and I hope we can one day return to that.
But I won't touch gambling, especially in the UK. It a nasty, predatory industry that preys on people. They know they are doing it, but they hide behind BS excuses and empty promises, and time after time investigations clearly show they intentionally goad on problem gamblers.
To be clear, this isn't a moral objection to people gambling. If you enjoy it, and are in control, then have fun. It's the companies, they are scum.
That was my last decade of work.
Working on another company now that will solve some other problems that I know about in this part of the industry.
Trade promotion is about short-term push strategies to get people to buy more. So things like cheaper sodas, chips, and other processed food could contribute to obesity. There's also massive food waste in the industry for the healthier options, but none of the trade promotion software I read about talked about reducing waste. So there can definitely be negative impacts in the food industry that you are enabling. I would bet that there's not a single job that doesn't have some negative impact.
There is demand forecasting software, and there are also logistics tools for things like tracking product temperature from farm to shelf to make sure it stays within the acceptable range...
Those are different tools though, and not the purpose of their TPM package.
So sure, there are absolutly knock on effects to anything you do. I don't think I am enabling these companies to sell any different products than they already were. All it does is find when the distributors or retailers are trying to say "you owe me $100k because I bought N of X product at Y price in the last month" and we know they are really only entitled to $70k, we give our customer the info to go talk to that distributor or retailer and say "here is why you are only getting $70k in rebates rather than what you said you were owed".
That works for any product, not just sugary drinks. We had some customers who sold medical supplies for example.
Tell yourself whatever you need to sleep at night though. You seem to just be a contrarian.
In the major mode, it feels like 90% are gambling, crypto or traditional finance. The remaining 10% are US tech companies getting a bit more for their money over here. Not sure how much longer that last subcategory will last. Most of these jobs will leave you wanting a good scrub in a scalding shower. Even the US ones.
The minor mode are where you'll find roles at UK-based tech companies, non-tech companies requiring programmers, web developers, etc. etc. The scope is vast and the pay is meh... and maybe my sample size is far too small and time-biased here, but I find the people at these places are so much more down to Earth, operate in a wider spectrum of fields and life experiences, and are just way more interesting and varied day-to-day than endless tech hype drudgery.
You wouldn't have guessed, but for the last 7 years, I have not been in a job at a minor mode company... and maybe the greener grass is glistening rather brightly right now!
We have a pretty abysmal tech landscape really given our involvement in computing history. It has all been sold off and gradually moved offshore. Europe has a reasonably heathly and open tech industry, albiet at a smaller scale than US, but of course us British are not allowed to play with them any more!
> traditional finance
Not sure when that was but in Australia a similar decision was made in... 2007 or 2008 maybe? It feels like it has been a constant race to the bottom with endless competing companies trying to out-do each other with enticements to bring in new/re-engage existing players (none of whom have any loyalty anyway).
I know monopolies have their issues but I don't remember it being like this when there was a single operator (yes there have always been problem gamblers but 20 years there wasn't wall to wall advertising, deposit-matching, odds-boost etc).
Feel like specifying what makes them so distinctly more parasitic than, say, a company like Google or Facebook? Both of which many people here seem to have no trouble working for.
It's a fuckton lower than the number of people who have lost all of their money and then killed themselves due to betting.
The morality line for me is at an unknown and unknowable (and you'll just have to deal with that I am a human not a computer) position that is higher than Google/Facebook and lower than gambling apps.
edit: lol no never mind, on further self-examination I would rather starve to death under a bridge than work at facebook trying to figure out how to use AI to addict people so that they buy dropshipped garbage from our advertisers and not the other guys.
I'm a strong believer in people being responsible for their own actions in the face of voluntary options, and free to reject the entreaties of companies whose primary and paramount interest is their own financial benefit at your expense. Gambling companies are a near perfect example of such companies since they sell little more than transient, vapid "fun" at the risk of you completely wrecking your life, but one still can choose. (Yes I know there are also people with a tremendous psychological addiction to gambling, but it's tricky to form both rules or general moral guidelines based on a small subset)
In the case of Google and Facebook (and a few others), some sorts of genuine services are available and they can at least claim by these services to be of a different character from some betting company. However, the case of either business type, a core motivation remains extracting as much as possible from users through mendacious, manipulative means while addicting them into continually using their systems for as long and intensely as possible. In this, they're remarkably similar to your average betting company, except the currency they desire is instead of money directly, your information and attention, and as much of both as possible for as long as possible.
Tobacco ads are already banned - gambling should 100% be a banned ad category. So should mobile apps that are basically gambling in disguise.
Defining bad is a big business. Here is a good book about it:
https://www.amazon.com/Compliance-Industrial-Complex-Operati...
I also watch the local news each morning as part of my morning routine.
It’s utterly ridiculous how many gambling ads are on tv now. Like outside of election season with political ads, it feels like 9 in 10 ads are for some gambling app. Sometimes a casino app, often sports betting. It feels so dystopian, like if I were an addict it would be seriously triggering me how constant and incessant the ads are. It’s always felt so strange to me that we allow this.
I’ve also had family members lose their livelihoods to gambling apps. They have perfected the addictiveness, giving you free credits if you lose too much, to keep you going. It’s extremely difficult to actually get money out of the apps too. They want you to gamble it all away, but slowly. Of all the things that have changed in this part of the country in my lifetime, this is the most obviously bad one, the one that makes me feel the most ashamed of how bad we’ve collectively let things get.
But the most obviously bad change I've seen is the drugs. I think they're also partially responsible for the popularity of gambling due to hopelessness and how bad things have gotten in some areas.
Edit: I should add that the other 50% of business seem to be fast food and dollar stores.
Drugs can lead to a decent path with the end stage of hopelessness and massively more problems than they started with.
I think early intervention is possible, and how it works for the vast majority of people. Not everyone who has a beer or line of coke starts off miserable and hopeless. That's later, after they have Dui's, lost jobs, broken relations, and failing health.
Perhaps tell that to one of my friends that has a shopping addiction. He buys endless amounts of running gear, and then resells it, basically burning thousands of pounds every year. His phone does nothing but show more and more running gear adverts. We've told him to stop but he reckons he doesn't have a problem. No runner needs 30 pairs of trainers a year, or 10 rucksacks etc.
However, some categories of products are categorically bad, like gambling. So we can ban anything that makes it easier to do those categories.
Where it makes sense is when you’re pulling in outside money from foreigners, but I don’t think many people go to the UK to gamble.
The same people who will say that gambling should be illegal are the same people who believe that you should be allowed to take any amount of psychoactive drugs that are addictive for almost everyone and leave a double-digit proportion of users with mental illness (as is apparent to anyone who has compared the US with other countries, the number of mentally ill people is staggering).
In particular, the US was the largest gambling market before...when it was illegal. The reason why it is legal is harm reduction. In addition, if you look at some markets where it is not only legal but significant government intervention in activity of gambling companies you find harm because it causes people to go back to illegal casinos.
All of this stuff has been proven over and over again across the world. But the reality is that people do not like other people doing things they don't do themselves. That is it.
And, for some reason, no-one had an issue when large donors to both US political parties were able to pass laws to make competition in gambling illegal. Massive political corruption that people who talk about morals had no issue with whatsoever...again, because it isn't about morals, it is about other people doing something they don't like and them wanting to stop them doing it.
Gambling is definitely one of the weird ones because it is only in countries like the US and China where gambling has a terrible rep...because it has been illegal and a great source of revenue for organised crime. In places like the UK, people gamble, they have fun, and just get on with their lives (again, it is so strange that the US has this attitude...drugs, morbid obesity...no, it is people betting on the Kentucky Derby that need to be brought to heel...of course, not the homeless person smoking crack, it is the guy betting $20 on the SuperBowl, he just can't control himself, the animal).
Finally, something that the Guardian never mention is that the only people gambling addiction treatment in the UK up to about three years ago was...gambling companies. NHS wouldn't fund it at all. I think people assume that the government will regulate correctly, that the government will create a better solution...nowhere is this more apparently wrong than in gambling sector (and one big issue in the UK has been increasing growth of the unregulated sector due to the significant rise in the cost of getting a licence due to the skyrocketing budget/staffing in the Gambling Commission...it is more important for them to keep budgets growing, keep the pay rises than reduce harm...who could have forseen this?).
The reason why the other information is included is because if you are arguing from fact, you do not understand this topic. None of the arguments are fact-based (when someone says they made a decision based on data, it does not mean it is objective).
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/63bc25b4d3bf7...
This looks fairly official and cites 1.05 to 1.77 billion £ in societal cost on page 6. That’s less than 14 billion £.
And I’m not even saying that gambling is fine or should be supported, I was just sceptical of the claim that the damages exceed the income.
It’s one of those things where yes people are forking over 14 billion per year, but that’s because they have 14 billion which would otherwise be spent on something else. Even just VAT on 14 billion gets close to the total tax revenue from UK gambling especially when you include other economic losses.
So where’s the benefit?
"Looking from a wider societal perspective, there are a range of costs that have not, or have only been partially quantified here (such as crime, education, cultural harms, impacts on relationships and wider impacts on the families of gamblers). For these reasons, we believe the figures of £412.9 million and £635 to £1,355.5 million to be an underestimate of the true scale of the total economic burden associated with harmful gambling."
you caught me in a bad mood, and I was sure of something and i was wrong.
i still think it is perverse to argue in favor of gambling companies - an "industry" that is at best zero sum, simply reallocating money from one hand to an arguably less deserving hand. but in practice is dramatically negative sum when families are torn apart.
That’s looking at harm specifically not economic costs.
Direct taxes to the state are £3.3 billion, but that also ignores missing tax revenue both directly from people spending money on gambling instead of other activities and missing revenue from that economic harm.
So offsetting ~1.5 billion in harm is an optimistic net gain of 0.7 billion in tax revenue.
In what other industry are those societal harms acceptable?
Source: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/gambling-related-...
I’m drawing a blank on the positive externalities gambling provides to offset its downsides? Reducing illegal gambling...
So:
* 1.2 million people die every year in car accidents
* 200k children die every year
* pollution, air pollution, but also noise pollution
* people sitting in traffic for hours every day, effectively doing nothing productive
* decade long destruction of communities to build roads.
* additionally and especially in the US these have been used to target communities of minorities
* Etc.
It does have also positive externalities, but the rare communities worldwide that decided to promote other means of transport in every day life have found they are better off. Thus in a lot of cases the negatives outweigh the positives.
Is this an excuse for gambling? No, but there are many of these around us in every day life, we just don't notice them. So I was merely answering a question asked.
Those communities have phones. Manufactured goods. They're watching Game of Thrones. If you remove motor vehicles all of that simply isn't possible due to the loss of productivity.
While I agree that preventing the intrusion of motor vehicle in residential areas would be good (ie have main roads where they're allowed, and small residential streets where they aren't. Lots of cities in Europe shifting to this currently), saying that the negatives outweigh the positives "in a lot of cases" I think is completely incorrect.
Negative externalities implies the net externalities are negative for some 3rd party, not just that there’s any negatives.
Economists don’t want to discourage net positive activities like exercise because they have some downsides. ‘People get hurt at the gym and occasionally miss work!’ isn’t a compelling argument. Frankly it’s meaningless to look at downsides in isolation, all that tells you is what scale it’s operating at.
Suppose smoking retained the unpleasant odor, but the health effects where reversed so smokers and people breathing second hand smoke lived significantly longer and healthier lives. Would economists suggest taxing it more to limit how many people smoked or limit where they could smoke? Of course not even though it had some downsides in terms of odor the benefits would hypothetically outweigh them.
We should crack down on these firms. They're a net negative for Britain.
I don't think a little gambling is bad, but the endless ads are a huge problem. They should really make all advertising of commonly addictive stuff banned - gambling, alcohol, etc. They should also do a better job of educating kids in school about the dangers and tricks.
They were going you $100+ to open an account, or doing a deposit match up to $1k here. It's exactly what drug dealers do to get people hooked or scam artists to con someone - here's a free taste, or a deal that's too good to pass up.
The people I know losing money to online sports betting are the same people who thought they were going to become pro online poker grinders 15 years ago.
If you got rid of online sports betting they would go play slots at the casino more and waste their money on the lottery.
If you get rid of all games of chance for money, there is a good % of people who will find a way to squander their savings somehow.
If anything, people I know waste far more money going out to eat than sports betting.
It might reduce the number of people who get into in the first place. But more likely and more importantly I would hope that it makes it easier for people who want to recover to not be tempted. I can't image what it would be like for an alcoholic to watch a cold refreshing beer cracked open in the types of party settings they used to enjoy during an ad, or for a gambler to see someone in an ad winning and hear that if you put $1k into an account they'll give you another $1k and other benefits.
Secondly, the bookies have a strong incentive to perpetuate this harm: much like with gatcha video games, which have the exact same moral hazard (and are exactly modeled on gambling), the 'whales' who get completely addicted bring in so much more revenue than those who occasionally gamble a little for a bit of fun, that even if they're a minority of customers they can make up the majority of revenue, and so they're going to make more money if they optimize for hooking them (there are some guardrails, to be fair: in contrast to said video games, there is a system where you can ban yourself from all the major bookies if you realize you have a problem. Probably doesn't make the ads any easier to sit through, though).
I'm not in favor of banning gambling altogether: I realise it's something a lot of people can engage with healthily, even if I have no interest in it at all. But I would be in favor of reigning in the advertising of it: it's kind of obnoxious how large a percentage of it is present in sports media anyway, even without the harms done. (I feel the same about alcohol ads, even if that is something I do like, and alcohol has a much lower moral hazard from the manufacturers in terms of hooking in alcoholics, because the ratios are not so extreme)
It's horrific really. I change channels as soon as one of those adverts come on. Premier League football teams are sponsored by them, and I suppose F1 cars probably are as well. But not cigarettes. Then again, I've never seen cigarettes ruin an entire family and for them to end up in financial ruin and without a house.
Someone else called them parasites, and they're not wrong.
In the US, your hypothetical mother who smokes and gets lung cancer could easily bankrupt the family and leave them in financial ruin (you know, if your family tries to pay for the treatments so she doesn't die).
Oh yeah, we're talking about the UK here...carry on.
In December 2020 I bet that Donald Trump had lost the US Presidential Election, which he had done the previous month.
Ordinarily of course you can't make bets like that because nobody wants the other side of the bet†, but there were plenty of takers for "No, Donald Trump actually won" so I got paid off, it wasn't a huge profit but it was meaningful.
† There are two ways you could be betting, sometimes you can bet "against the house". A company is trying to adjust the odds such that whoever wins, they end up benefiting, it can be tricky to do this and requires expertise so... the other way is you're betting against other punters like you, which works like the buy/sell orders on a stock exchange and the house just gets a percentage no matter what happens. Political gambling tends to be on the latter basis.
[Edited: I originally wrote December 2021, but obviously it's December 2020 when I made that bet, he lost in November 2020, not November 2021]
The odds didn't look so friendly when I considered them as a chance of a coup.
And indeed, then Jan 6 happened, and people are sill here on this website arguing that what specifically happened on that day doesn't meet their idea of an attempted coup.
Now, if you're an American that doesn't help, the newly installed regime after a coup can just insist facts aren't true, so the bet is still unwise, but I'm not an American.
That sounds like a different "Signal" than most people are aware of.
Their marketing department assuredly pulled long hours carefully and intentionally crafting statements meant to cause the recipient to believe something false or at the very least different than what they actually believe, i.e. deception. They almost certainly ran focus groups verifying that their targets would, in fact, believe the untrue things they wanted them to believe that would enrich themselves.
In court they will say: "Technically, your honor, the words used could, in the most contrived and worst of all possible universes, actually mean something true; so our deliberate and intentional actions to make sure that they would be misinterpreted by our victims can not be held against us." If you carefully crafted a statement and verified its reception and interpretation, and only after it has been misinterpreted as intended then claim that "technically, your honor..." you should be guilty of false advertising or equivalent. You had plenty of opportunity to make sure that the standard interpretation of your statements would be accurate, but you intentionally chose to make it deceptive for your own enrichment.
The more time, money, and effort spent on a message, the more accurate, truthful, and only unintentionally misinterpretable to your benefit it should be. All of that effort now spent on focus grouping how to make it intentionally deceptive must instead be focused on making it intentionally truthful. This would reward true, accurate, and helpful marketing that seeks to inform at the cost of hampering false, deceptive, misleading marketing seeking to separate society from its money for garbage or actively harmful products and services.
"Technically, your honor..." should be met with "Go directly to jail".