EXPOSÉ: LEARNING THE TRICKS OF A DARK TRADE
Our undercover reporter went inside Bet365’s Gibraltar base ... where staff are trained to keep big losers throwing their money away
IT is the first week of my €24,000a-year job as a customer account advisor at Bet365’s Gibraltar HQ.
In a classroom on the second floor, I am one of 14 new recruits being taught why it doesn’t always pay to win in the extraordinary world of online betting.
From customer bonuses that ‘reward loyalty’ to cash incentives for big losers, I learned that Bet365 offers a dizzying array of ‘perks’ for people prepared to gamble away their cash.
In front of a white flipboard, a training officer coaches us through how this firm provides losers with money to keep betting. She says: ‘We have something called a rebate … that’s basically, if you’ve lost this much, we’re gonna give you a percentage of it back so you can continue to play.’
Incredibly, I’m told that a customer who loses £15,000 (€17,000) in a week could get £1,500 (€1,700) back to keep betting.
‘A VIP will have things like they might get a weekly rebate on how much they’ve lost. So if they’ve lost, say, £15,000 a week, then we’ll give them a weekly rebate, normally on a Tuesday, and we’ll give them maybe 10% of that back.’
The practice of giving rebates is part of the byzantine system of ‘enticements’ Bet365 offers to its biggest spenders, including VIP treatment and the chance to win tickets to high-profile sporting events such as the FA Cup Final and the Irish Open. I ask the training officer, who says she has previously trained the VIP team, if winners are rewarded in the same way as VIPs. Matter of factly, she explains they are not, because ‘they’re not making us any money’. ‘You could put a 20p slot bet on and win the jackpot of half a million pounds. That doesn’t make them a VIP. It just means they’re very f***ing lucky.’
They certainly are. During my training, the emphasis on rewarding players who lose was remarkable. After just 15 weeks of training, I was told that even I would have been qualified to hand out a £50 (€57) bonus to anyone who called the customer service line. We were given examples of other offers – bingo loyalty nights, live blackjack cashback schemes, ‘bingo booster’ nights and chances to ‘double your winnings’.
Campaigners have spent years accusing bookmakers such as Bet365 of putting their €780million-a-year profit before people.
After becoming the first journalist to infiltrate the heart of the online betting industry in Gibraltar, I could not agree more.
Our trainer invited us to explain why bonuses are so important to Bet365. She listed them on her flipchart: To attract new customers, to reward loyal customers, to rebate losers so they can continue playing, and to lure back customers whose accounts have been inactive. She explains: ‘Bonuses are there to say you spend this much, or you use this much, over a certain amount of time then we’re gonna reward you.’
So it seems as though the more you lose, the more opportunities you are offered to lose even more.
At one point, she explains that the other group – beyond big losers and high spenders – who are guar- anteed kid-glove treatment are those in the public eye.
‘Well-known customers are guaranteed exceptional customer service’, she says. ‘This could be your celebrities, let’s say it was Messi or Rooney or somebody very well known. They will never have an account which is in their own name, but you’ll be able to see from their status it’s a well-known person. It could also be somebody well known in the industry.’
It did not look great when during our presentation on responsible gambling our trainer told us: ‘I hate this PowerPoint. But I have to do it.’ Cutting the ‘very dry’ document short, she took us through the issues via the website instead.
She did explain that the company has a ‘moral responsibility’ to identify and protect potential gambling addicts. But to me this seemed somewhat at odds with our tutorial about returning money to people who had big losses, which would surely allow them to keep betting – and losing.
We are shown Bet365’s ‘live casino’, for example, where players can wager on table games hosted by real-life named dealers. These are mostly women in revealing clothing working out of low-budget TV studios based in Latvia and the Philippines. These 24/7 live shows are produced by a third-party provider, but Bet365 pays them to run tables carrying company branding. Our trainer jokes that the girls get more tips if they wear fewer clothes. Staff are clearly proud of the global success of Bet365 – which provides betting services to 35million people worldwide – as our trainer tells us gleefully: ‘You can’t watch TV any more without Bet365 popping up everywhere. The amount of markets that we’ve got is huge… Third league football, reserves league. Really random ones. We’ve got volleyball, greyhounds, e-sports.’
She reveals the company’s ultimate aspiration is to expand into North America, where it is currently not licensed to operate. ‘One day we might be … It would be lovely to have Bet365 on the Vegas strip next to Caesar’s Palace.’ For now, however, Bet365 bestrides the gambling industry from what our trainer describes as the ‘great tax haven’ of Gibraltar, where the company goes to great lengths to keep the details of its training programme and customer information from prying eyes. We were told: ‘Anything you do in this company stays within the four walls of this company. That includes your job, your job title… no information [is] given to anyone outside.’
Access to every room is controlled by scanners in staff ID cards
We have something called a rebate … if you’ve lost this much, we’re gonna give you a percentage of it back so you can continue to play
which pinpoint our location in the building. All computer screens must be ‘locked’ if we are more than a metre from our desks, every document shredded after use.
Such attention to detail has no doubt played a part in Bet365’s extraordinary success, and in the wealth of its chief executive Denise Coates who earned €300million in 2018. But such wealth comes at a price. At one point, I ask our trainer if desperate customers are ever allowed to reclaim their losses.
Describing ‘one of the worst conversations she ever had’, she recalls: ‘A person sent an email and it was pages and pages long – about how he’d spent his wedding fund on gambling and he needed to have these bets voided for him, otherwise he’d lose his future wife. It was horrendous to read. And you think, “I would love to be able to just give you your money, but you’re probably going to do exactly the same thing in an hour’s time”.’
We were told he was not given his money back.