Former customer sues Ladbrokes over gambling losses
The British customer claims Ladbrokes should have placed restrictions on his account due to his heavy losses.
UK.- A former customer is taking Entain’s Ladbrokes to the High Court, accusing the company of ignoring his gambling problems and allowing him to lose large sums. The former player says Ladbrokes failed to impose restrictions on his account despite him betting £1.8m in just seven months between 2015 – 2016.
The lawsuit alleges that Ladbrokes allowed the man to wager an average of £18,000 a day without subjecting him to anti-money laundering checks. He was given a deposit limit of £20,000 despite having take-home pay of £3,000 a month. In seven months, he lost £231,000 before he self-excluded from gambling in May 2016.
The plaintiff, Simon Rose, alleges that there was a clear failure to protect him from problem gambling and also to follow anti-money laundering (AML) guidelines. He says that Ladbrokes should have monitored his betting and either contacted him or placed restrictions on his account until his source of funds could be verified.
Rose claims that Ladbrokes took no action to check his source of funds or to communicate with him about potential problem gambling until his losses reached £100,000. At this point, Ladbrokes discovered that Rose had borrowed money to gamble and was unable to afford the amounts he was wagering. However, he says he had to apply a £1,000 weekly deposit limit by himself and was able to increase it to £20,000 in just a few months.
Ladbrokes denies breaching contractual terms, but the High Court action is the second recent blow to Entain’s reputation on responsible gambling, coming just after the Gambling Commission hit it with a £17m fine (the largest fine in UK gambling history for failings that occurred between 2019 and 2020).
Last week, the spread betting and fixed-odds betting operator, SpreadEx, became the latest operator to face regulatory action from the British Gambling Commission. It will pay a £1.36m penalty for a series of social responsibility and anti-money laundering failings.
