I don’t know what the solution is, but gambling (and particularly online gambling and video gambling) is a scourge on our society. I don’t think it should be outlawed, because adults should be free to make bad choices if they want to, but the level to which it is exploitive and harmful needs to be reduced.
Well I don't. Generally I like education but education can only go so far.
How do you help the people without the wherewithal - for whatever reason - to understand their actions and the actions of those around them in the bigger picture, while still treating them as discerning adults? I am not sure you can...
To further this point a bit, there is a difference between "gambling above their means yet within the realm of possibility", and "gambling so far above their means that clearly no one is using common sense". Gambling 100x your annual income feels like it belongs in the second category.
Many other industries have KYC regulations (of some kind), but it seems like the gambling industry is excluded.
I think everyone can agree that the employee is the #1 scumbag in this story. I think a 4 year sentence is woefully inadequate for someone who effectively stole her employers retirement years, years he cannot replace.
Some blame can be assigned the business owner. How can you go so many years without a 3rd party audid, or Some kind of second opinion to your finances? Though trust shouldn’t be so harshly criticized.
The casino is in a tough spot. If it returns any money, it sets a precedent that would turn its industry on its head. It’s also not necessarily fair to its investors, and it would be hard to unwind all the hires, raises, and investments that were made with the fraudulently gambled winnings.
It almost feels like a charity should be established and funded by the casino; a vehicle to right wrongs such as these, without admitting fault/setting a precedent. Heck the casino would even get tax write offs for the charitable donations
I think it would set exactly the right precedent. Anyone else who receives stolen goods, whether knowingly or not, has to give it back, and might be found liable.
The courts will do the investigation for you. Why not have insurance on your end, in case the government seizes the money because it wasn't the criminal's to give to you?
If I rob a bank and use a bunch of marked bills to buy a nice dinner, the restaurant doesn’t get to keep that money when the police come knocking, does it?
I'm not saying this as some sort of matter of moral conviction. I can't speak for Australia, but in the U.S., if you are found in possession of stolen property, you have to give it back. And if a prosecutor thinks they can prove you knew or should have known, they can charge you with a crime. I don't see why businesses should get a pass on this when individuals don't.
I wonder if this might unintentionally incentivize _more_ cases of embezzlement. After all, gambling addicts with dysfunctional moral compasses could say, “and if I lose, grandma can still get her money back”. Much in the way that employees/friends/family members justify stealing credit cards because ‘they can just report it as fraud’.
Make gambling losses refundable unless the bettor posts a bond in advance. Only allow one purchase of chips per day.
This prevents bleeding people drip by drip, while still allowing gambling.
Mandate that all chips display actual cash value.
Require signed disclosures with big warnings about the risks and costs of gambling, every time chips are purchased, like required on
mortgages.
Yes but casinos have lots of money to constantly lobby and enable the way of addiction one way or another. There are lots of addicts in casinos, I'm not saying that most of them are but quite a bit of casino frequenters are addict and any changes in legislation that would make these people not come back would reduce income which in turn would reduce taxes and so on. One hand scratches the other.
Education is the only alternative I see to help people not fall into the gambling trap.
Maybe not fair. But they invested their money into a business whose business model is to rip off its customers. They could have invested in a thousand other businesses that actually produce something useful to the society, yet they chose to put their money into a business which removes clocks on its premises so people would stay longer and gamble more and lose more.
Casinos maybe legally good, but they are ethically/morally bad.
On a related note - I find it funny that I need to be an accredited investor to invest in a huge range of businesses, but I can just walk into a casino and gamble away all my money, even if I am a minimum wage earner. Never understood that part.
I’m largely convinced that the accredited investor rules are there to gatekeep the best / most lucrative investments and limit them to the already rich club. No other explanation makes sense when you also consider that casinos exist.
I'd agree with this. Although in the US there was recently added another exemption to become an accredited investor: passing a knowledge test.
What interested me was: republicans are in support of removing accredited investor status making your same argument that it bars the masses from lucrative investments, while democrats fought allowing a test to qualify investors for accredited status, arguing that the masses would expose themselves to too much risk.
Is this a personal liberty vs authoritarian take?
Is this a personal liberty vs empathetic (though paternalistic) take?
Is this a quiet "let's exploit investors" vs "prevent investor exploitation" take?
Couldn't this be argued for a lot of things: boxing / UFC is legal but fighting is ethically/morally bad and should not be encouraged, celebrated, or promoted. American football is legal but has pretty horrific long-term effects on the human brain. Beauty pageants, the list goes on.
You're right about the accredited investor double-standard though, hopefully that gets removed soon.
I don't think your analogy holds good here. Combat sports is between highly trained professionals, with very strict rules. You don't see a 125 pound man fighting a 250 pound man in UFC, do you? There are no such rules in a casino. Everything in a casino is rigged against its patrons. It is not a level playing field. You can gamble away all your life's earnings in one evening if you wanted to. If there are rules like one cannot gamble more than 5% of their net worth, one cannot continue gambling if they lost x amount of dollars in x amount of time... or something along those lines, then maybe we can compare casinos with combat sports.
Don't forget that gambling is also highly addictive.
We may not like American football, beauty pageants etc. But at least those are level playing fields and not addictive
In some ways, combat sports might be worse. Athletes are gambling with their bodies in return for potential monetary reward, and most don't even make it into the big leagues.
With casinos, at least they only lose money and are unlikely to have to live with lifelong injuries.
You’re missing the point. Athletes are gambling with their health, yes. But they have a 50-50 chance of winning or losing. Casinos are not 50-50. They are rigged against their customers.
I wouldn’t have a problem with gambling if the odds are even.
Also, combat sports are not addictive, gambling is.
I think the casino is the #1 scumbag not the employee. The employee was a gambling addict and the casino willingly exploited her addiction:
> Clerke is now in prison and none of her close relatives would talk to ABC Investigations for this story. The closest we can get to understanding her behaviour is through what was said in court, and through Hannah*, a gaming attendant who worked in the club back when Clerke was obsessively playing the poker machines there.
> "She was quiet and pretty much kept to herself. But she was lovely. She would come in at night and would often leave at closing, at 4am," Hannah says.
> "She was one of the big spenders. I was told [by a colleague] she was the number 1 gambler in the club."
> The court heard that a forensic psychologist had found that Clerke suffered from fear and anxiety, and that she played the poker machines to help her cope with her distress.
> As someone who suffered from low self-esteem, Clerke would have appreciated the VIP treatment and attention she received at St Marys Leagues club.
> "Vicki was at the highest level in the rewards program which is called Pink Diamond," says Hannah. "That meant she got VIP service from a personal attendant, free soft drinks and coffee, meals from her rewards points. All those on the top rewards tier are made to feel special."
I used to work next to a company that ran an online gambling site. They were about ten employees, some developers, a few graphic designers and project managers. One of them revealed that almost all their profit came from a dozen whales. One girl who worked there was their chat moderator. Her job was to greet the whales in their virtual lobby, cheer for them when they won and "comfort" them when they lost.
There are many vices in the world. The underlying commonality is that they’re all addictive. In spite of that, I don’t subscribe to the belief that their addictive qualities exonerate their participants. Nor does it transform thieves, addicts, or delinquents into victims.
The club could deduce just from this woman's address that she didn't have $XX million available to her for gambling - if it were even trying 1% to spot problem gamblers.
In the case of St Mary's,
> The not-for-profit community club has over $85 million in net assets.
That's crazy! It is a suburban football club!
Well, clearly, it isn't. Clearly, it is an entirely different form of enterprise, disguised as something it isn't.
Clubs that do this are protected from consequences by governments that won't introduce legislation because of reasons that I can't write without having the resources to defend against a spurious defamation action that would bankrupt me.
When Madoff was uncovered and investigated, there were clawbacks from the "winners" of such schemes. The clubs here were the "winner" of a scam/fraud, and also were negligent in not cutting off an obvious problem gambler. This isn't the first time something like this has happened. I don't see why they shouldn't be subject to similar clawbacks.
Absolutely should not rely on them setting up a "charity".
She wasn’t gambling in a casino. She was gambling in what is essentially a pub that has a large room filled with pokie machines.
This is common across Australia, pubs have dedicated rooms (so called vip rooms) filled with pokie machines as they bring in a lot of money for the owners. Pubs are ripping out dining/general social space and putting in Pokie rooms.
It’s cultural to go have a pint and a bet.
She’s absolutely responsible for stealing but Australia’s obsession with Pokie machines and amount of Pokie machines is also problematic encouraging problem gambling. Pokie machines provide no benefit to anyone except the owners.
Not being Australian born the gambling commercials on tv was also eye opening.
For what it's worth, WA doesn't allow these sorts of clubs or pokies -- and we seem to be doing quite well, thank you. :P
I would prefer to see these sorts of clubs outlawed, and gambling only allowed to take place in licensed casinos, with very strict regulations around checking that the people gambling are doing so with full knowledge and are actually in a position do so...
Maybe setup more saving vehicles similar to a 401k that let people put their money into savings before it hits their bank account.
Like what if you could have part of your paycheck automatically sent to an account that your landlord/bank pulls from for your housing, have some put in a savings account that you can only access after x years, some that you can only spend on groceries, etc. Then people who know they have a problem can ensure they don't spend money they need for other things on gambling.
You’re underestimating the gambling addiction. They’ll pawn the house, they’d even sell parts of their bodies if they could. It’s a horrible affliction
This is not the first story I've heard of employees stealing millions from their long term employer to fund their gambling habit, in fact it is shockingly very common.
A solution is to have casinos track/report customer spending, if a customer is spending (and losing) very large sums of money (say over 50-100k), they should verify their income.
I help run a small money remittence business and we're legally required to verify the payslips/income of customers who send X amount per fortnight (I forgot the limit as it's been a while since I dealt with compliance) and we send the data to a government body. If a small business can verify income and see where the money is coming from I don't see why casinos can't do the same.
After I wrote this I realised this isn't actually feasible as people can just walk in to casinos without being identified (never been to one). Maybe this needs to change, maybe memberships should be required for entry into casinos, just like you would a gym. It's just crazy to me someone can swindle 3.7m without causing any alarms.
Gambling is as much an addiction as are hard drugs and it has similar effects on the brain circuitry. Im not a fan of this ‘sport’ at all. I witnessed how a friend ruined his life and aged 20 years within the timespan of 6 or 7.
Ouch, that is a horrible way to postpone retirement. It’s still hard to comprehend how that much money was stolen without any suspicion of any kind and over such a long period of time.
I don't quite get how the loss could have such an effect. The article says
"She hid her theft by creating dummy bills for suppliers and paying the money directly into her account."
If I'm reading this correctly, fake bills were created and entered as expenses, which were then paid from the company bank account.
If so, wouldn't the losses have shown up on the income statement? That would mean that the owner had the same amount of money he thought he had, but less than he should have had.
If I understand correctly this went on for some years. I still find it hard to comprehend how it went undetected for so long. But it did happen so it’s clearly possible
The article says her losses were $3.7m, but the amount she gambled far greater.
> Mr Zeuschner has calculated that Clerke would have put a staggering $20 million through the poker machines at St Marys over the 17 years she was stealing money from his business.
Perhaps she was repatriating the winnings, and so the signal of her losses were masked over time.
> I don't quite get how the loss could have such an effect.
The main damage to the business was the revealing of the fraud and driving away the people who were going to buy it.
Nobody is going to stick around for years waiting for court proceedings to finish up to complete a purchase of a small business - they’ll just find something else.
A lot of small businesses do not create financial oversight practices. I see it where I work. We're so focused on our product that nobody takes care to watch the books.
No company, no matter how small, should only have one person manage the books.
KYC and Source of Wealth info is pretty common in the gambling industry. For example at the company I worked at when you hit 2k EUR (or equivilent) your account would be locked until you gave information as to where the money came from. It's an overhead for sure but it should be the cost of running a gambling business.
Gambling addiction is real and while it is the responsibility of the person not to defraud others to support their addiction the casino should have picked up on it. Just like you wouldn't expect a bar tender to continue serving someone who is practically on the floor passing out.
55 comments
[ 2.2 ms ] story [ 114 ms ] threadDoes anyone have any good answers here?
How do you help the people without the wherewithal - for whatever reason - to understand their actions and the actions of those around them in the bigger picture, while still treating them as discerning adults? I am not sure you can...
What about the responsibility of the house to detect ordinary people gambling way over their means?
Many other industries have KYC regulations (of some kind), but it seems like the gambling industry is excluded.
Jail the addict.
Protect the profits.
Don’t compensate the victim of theft.
That’s a recipe for rinse and repeat ad nauseum.
Some blame can be assigned the business owner. How can you go so many years without a 3rd party audid, or Some kind of second opinion to your finances? Though trust shouldn’t be so harshly criticized.
The casino is in a tough spot. If it returns any money, it sets a precedent that would turn its industry on its head. It’s also not necessarily fair to its investors, and it would be hard to unwind all the hires, raises, and investments that were made with the fraudulently gambled winnings.
It almost feels like a charity should be established and funded by the casino; a vehicle to right wrongs such as these, without admitting fault/setting a precedent. Heck the casino would even get tax write offs for the charitable donations
If you want to make the victim whole, that's what insurance is for.
Mandate that all chips display actual cash value.
Require signed disclosures with big warnings about the risks and costs of gambling, every time chips are purchased, like required on mortgages.
Apply Accredited Investor rules to gambling.
Mandate warning labels like on cigarettes.
> Apply Accredited Investor rules to gambling.
Sorry, you should not need to earn $200k per year or be a millionaire to go blow a few hundred bucks at a casino. That's crazy.
Maybe not fair. But they invested their money into a business whose business model is to rip off its customers. They could have invested in a thousand other businesses that actually produce something useful to the society, yet they chose to put their money into a business which removes clocks on its premises so people would stay longer and gamble more and lose more.
Casinos maybe legally good, but they are ethically/morally bad.
On a related note - I find it funny that I need to be an accredited investor to invest in a huge range of businesses, but I can just walk into a casino and gamble away all my money, even if I am a minimum wage earner. Never understood that part.
What interested me was: republicans are in support of removing accredited investor status making your same argument that it bars the masses from lucrative investments, while democrats fought allowing a test to qualify investors for accredited status, arguing that the masses would expose themselves to too much risk.
Is this a personal liberty vs authoritarian take? Is this a personal liberty vs empathetic (though paternalistic) take? Is this a quiet "let's exploit investors" vs "prevent investor exploitation" take?
For some reason their positions have me stumped.
You're right about the accredited investor double-standard though, hopefully that gets removed soon.
Don't forget that gambling is also highly addictive.
We may not like American football, beauty pageants etc. But at least those are level playing fields and not addictive
With casinos, at least they only lose money and are unlikely to have to live with lifelong injuries.
I wouldn’t have a problem with gambling if the odds are even.
Also, combat sports are not addictive, gambling is.
> Clerke is now in prison and none of her close relatives would talk to ABC Investigations for this story. The closest we can get to understanding her behaviour is through what was said in court, and through Hannah*, a gaming attendant who worked in the club back when Clerke was obsessively playing the poker machines there.
> "She was quiet and pretty much kept to herself. But she was lovely. She would come in at night and would often leave at closing, at 4am," Hannah says.
> "She was one of the big spenders. I was told [by a colleague] she was the number 1 gambler in the club."
> The court heard that a forensic psychologist had found that Clerke suffered from fear and anxiety, and that she played the poker machines to help her cope with her distress.
> As someone who suffered from low self-esteem, Clerke would have appreciated the VIP treatment and attention she received at St Marys Leagues club.
> "Vicki was at the highest level in the rewards program which is called Pink Diamond," says Hannah. "That meant she got VIP service from a personal attendant, free soft drinks and coffee, meals from her rewards points. All those on the top rewards tier are made to feel special."
I used to work next to a company that ran an online gambling site. They were about ten employees, some developers, a few graphic designers and project managers. One of them revealed that almost all their profit came from a dozen whales. One girl who worked there was their chat moderator. Her job was to greet the whales in their virtual lobby, cheer for them when they won and "comfort" them when they lost.
Patrons have to apply for membership.
The club could deduce just from this woman's address that she didn't have $XX million available to her for gambling - if it were even trying 1% to spot problem gamblers.
In the case of St Mary's,
> The not-for-profit community club has over $85 million in net assets.
That's crazy! It is a suburban football club!
Well, clearly, it isn't. Clearly, it is an entirely different form of enterprise, disguised as something it isn't.
Clubs that do this are protected from consequences by governments that won't introduce legislation because of reasons that I can't write without having the resources to defend against a spurious defamation action that would bankrupt me.
Absolutely should not rely on them setting up a "charity".
She wasn’t gambling in a casino. She was gambling in what is essentially a pub that has a large room filled with pokie machines.
This is common across Australia, pubs have dedicated rooms (so called vip rooms) filled with pokie machines as they bring in a lot of money for the owners. Pubs are ripping out dining/general social space and putting in Pokie rooms.
It’s cultural to go have a pint and a bet.
She’s absolutely responsible for stealing but Australia’s obsession with Pokie machines and amount of Pokie machines is also problematic encouraging problem gambling. Pokie machines provide no benefit to anyone except the owners.
Not being Australian born the gambling commercials on tv was also eye opening.
I would prefer to see these sorts of clubs outlawed, and gambling only allowed to take place in licensed casinos, with very strict regulations around checking that the people gambling are doing so with full knowledge and are actually in a position do so...
yeah, she should get a sentence commensurate with financial-crisis-causing wall street bankers. oh wait...
Like what if you could have part of your paycheck automatically sent to an account that your landlord/bank pulls from for your housing, have some put in a savings account that you can only access after x years, some that you can only spend on groceries, etc. Then people who know they have a problem can ensure they don't spend money they need for other things on gambling.
A solution is to have casinos track/report customer spending, if a customer is spending (and losing) very large sums of money (say over 50-100k), they should verify their income.
I help run a small money remittence business and we're legally required to verify the payslips/income of customers who send X amount per fortnight (I forgot the limit as it's been a while since I dealt with compliance) and we send the data to a government body. If a small business can verify income and see where the money is coming from I don't see why casinos can't do the same.
After I wrote this I realised this isn't actually feasible as people can just walk in to casinos without being identified (never been to one). Maybe this needs to change, maybe memberships should be required for entry into casinos, just like you would a gym. It's just crazy to me someone can swindle 3.7m without causing any alarms.
"She hid her theft by creating dummy bills for suppliers and paying the money directly into her account."
If I'm reading this correctly, fake bills were created and entered as expenses, which were then paid from the company bank account.
If so, wouldn't the losses have shown up on the income statement? That would mean that the owner had the same amount of money he thought he had, but less than he should have had.
Likely some details are missing from the article.
> Mr Zeuschner has calculated that Clerke would have put a staggering $20 million through the poker machines at St Marys over the 17 years she was stealing money from his business.
Perhaps she was repatriating the winnings, and so the signal of her losses were masked over time.
$3.7m over 17 years = $218,000 per year.
The main damage to the business was the revealing of the fraud and driving away the people who were going to buy it.
Nobody is going to stick around for years waiting for court proceedings to finish up to complete a purchase of a small business - they’ll just find something else.
No company, no matter how small, should only have one person manage the books.
Gambling addiction is real and while it is the responsibility of the person not to defraud others to support their addiction the casino should have picked up on it. Just like you wouldn't expect a bar tender to continue serving someone who is practically on the floor passing out.