(not satire – it’s the UK today)
Here’s proof that high street bookmakers are allowing gamblers to spend massive amounts of money without any intervention required under even their own regulations.
In this particular case, high street bookmaker Coral allowed a known gambling addict to spend £3,500 in less than 60 minutes on a Fixed Odds Betting Terminal – known in the industry as the crack cocaine of gambling:
The gambler who lost the money illustrated above has confirmed there was no intervention from Coral staff.
Many bookmakers also allow gamblers to use gaming machines with a debit card. Which is also supposed to be against the regulations.
The Gaming Machine (Supply &c.) Regulations 2007, Methods of Payment, 2.1 states that:
“A gaming machine shall not be supplied or installed if it is designed or adapted to permit money to be paid by means of a credit card or debit card.”
Unfortunately this problem is not restricted to Coral. You can walk into any high street bookmaker and empty your account without a question being asked.
Of course, someone more cynical than me might think gaming companies were being allowed to get away with this because some MPs are receiving ‘benefits’ from the gambling industry:
Tory MP to be investigated over gambling industry benefits
And someone even more cynical might think George Orwell was right all along about this kind of gambling (from his novel 1984):
“Heavy physical work, the care of home and children, petty quarrels with neighbours, films, football, beer, and above all gambling, filled up the horizon of their minds. To keep them in control was not difficult. All that was required of them was a primitive patriotism which could be appealed to whenever it was necessary to make them accept longer working hours or shorter rations. And when they become discontented, as they sometimes did, their discontentment led nowhere, because being without general ideas, they could only focus it on petty specific grievances.”
Remind you of anything?
Don’t say we weren’t warned!
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Thanks to UK charity Rethink Gambling for the information.
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Please feel free to share. And comment.
Pride's Purge 
Reblogged this on rethinkgambling.
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Like a drug addict alcoholic gambling is another but ask this government for help they turn the other cheek has they found having a finger in these tills can be most profitable jeff3
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The simple answer is not to gamble, period, and that includes lotteries, gee-gees, greyhounds, casinos, card games, the whole gambling shebang….. The way to not gamble is to resist the temptation to speculate to get more, which at bottom is a form of greed and delusion.
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Reblogged this on sdbast.
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These bookies are just legalised crooks, so long as they get the money they don’t care
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I see you resisted the temptation to mention which party relaxed the gambling laws and so created far more addicts!
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Reblogged this on Beastrabban’s Weblog and commented:
The Tories were the first to relax the gaming laws to allow betting shops to open on the High Street after the War. Then Blair came in and liberalised them still further, with the full support of the gambling industry and plans to open vast ‘super-casinos’ that would turn places like Blackpool into ‘Las Vegas’. This fortunately hasn’t happened. We are, however, still left with the proliferation of betting shops in our high streets and the blight of on-line gambling sites. You can see the adverts for them anytime you like on light night TV. As a result, there are thousands of people, whose lives are devastated and destroyed by gambling addiction. The adverts advising gamblers to seek help before becoming addicted isn’t enough. It’s time to do to the gambling industry what successive legislation has done to the tobacco.
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