Regulators have admitted that online bookies have been 'conning' the public – but they haven't gone far enough

Online gambling companies have spent a colossal £1.4bn on adverts since 2012, including TV ads that primarily feature at the only time they’re permitted before the watershed: during live sporting events. Operators know that viewers are unable to fast forward ads, making them lucrative slots. Since the gambling laws were relaxed by New Labour, we’ve not been able to watch Premier League football without being bombarded with enticements to gamble.

If you’ve seen the ads, you’ll have noticed that aside from selling gambling as a lifestyle product, or simply a part of watching sport, sign-ups are incentivised with “bonuses”. This is because new customers are vital to the industries business model. Problematic gambling accounts for around 60 per cent of total losses, and problem gamblers “play to extinction” – a rather morbid industry term for “gamble until all of their money’s gone”.

For more than a decade, these bonuses have been offered to customers, usually automatically added to their first deposit. For example, if you were to deposit £100, and a 100 per cent matched bonus was offered, you’d get £200 to gamble with.

But what’s to stop you simply signing up to multiple sites, getting the deposit bonus and withdrawing this money? Something called “wagering requirements” – withdrawal is only permitted once the deposit plus the bonus have been wagered a certain number of times. Which might seem fair enough, as otherwise they’d be giving free money away. But for more than a decade, many operators have been demanding a wagering requirement of 99 times before you can withdraw your money. This was tucked away in the small print.

So in the example given, you couldn’t withdraw the £200 deposit plus bonus until you’d made £19,800 worth of bets. In many cases, this forces new gamblers to “play to extinction” because turning over that amount is highly unlikely without eventually losing it all. The Competition and Markets Authority eventually caught wind of this, identifying that “gambling is a risk but it shouldn’t be a con”. After a year-long investigation into Ladbrokes, William Hill and PT Entertainment, this week they announced they were in breach of consumer protection law.

But after years and years of trapping players’ money, of conning the British people, of taking advantage of the lack of oversight on consumer protection, and raking in billions from players unfairly, what penalty was given to operators? None. They were just asked, very nicely, to stop wagering requirements.

But corporations, particularly gambling companies, are always going to behave in this way. They exist to maximise profit, and will do so by any means possible. The regulatory framework in Britain has to move away from this nonsense neoliberal perception that businesses “want to do the right thing” and if they fall short “it’s because they need a bit of help” and “we need to change the culture of the industry”. If there aren’t prescriptive rules, then no rules will be followed, and if there aren’t meaningful sanctions, then there is no point having any rules.

The message this whole fiasco sends out to businesses is: go ahead and con the British people, you might as well, because there will be zero consequences when we catch up with it in about ten years’ time.

Matt Zarb-Cousin is spokesperson for the Campaign for Fairer Gambling