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UK betting giant's unlawful marketing kept suicidal gambler hooked

Sam found himself getting sucked deeper and deeper in to betting, sometimes risking £10,000 in a day. Now a judge has ruled he was unlawfully targeted

Now, as the wider gambling industry faces mounting scrutiny – and amid calls for regulators to intervene – the Observer can reveal the inner workings of the Sky Bet group’s “black box”: how it and its partners gathered 2,400 spreadsheets of data about a vulnerable customer, from his disordered spending habits to the exact times he played specific games, and used it to predict his behaviour and create marketing that was “hard to resist”. Among unintelligible spreadsheets listing pieces of code, his years of gambling were spelled out in black and white: his history of playing slots, his favourite sport (football), the number of deposits made since opening an account (2,514) and his completed bets (44,063). She described Sky Bet’s system as “a cliff edge”: people hitting the threshold would stop receiving marketing altogether, while those falling just short could be labelled a potential “high value asset” and subject to “enhanced targeting”.

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