iGaming Daily

Andrew McCarron (00:00.3)
Black market prevention, a key topic not only for those working within the industry, but pivotal for consumers to understand when it comes to player safety. And this will be the talking point on today's episode of iGaming Daily brought to you by OptiMove as myself, Christine Lee, business journalist, iGaming expert, and Victor Kaya, the senior journalist at SBC attended the Black Market Prevention Summit hosted by DealMeOut in Manchester earlier this week. So Vic, how are doing? How did you find the event?

Very insightful, first of all, hey, hello James, hi Christian. We went together to the event. I believe that all of us individually got a lot of valuable insights into the world of problem gambling and what it can lead to, especially on a personal aspect. We're not talking about purely commercially.

And yeah, I'm excited to talk about the most, the aspects that most stood out, that stood out to me the most. Yeah, you are right there. was very insightful, the conversation that we had, both from what charities are trying to do and trying to introduce and there's a lot of regulation talk around it. came out a great time as well. The week following when the red levy announcement was made by Baroness Tarncross.

that's set to come in in April. There was a load of conversations surrounding that, but also like you said, the personal conversations that happened on stage as well, actually hearing those experiences and what people went through and what they would have liked to see introduced and what they want to see introduced moving forward. Christian, what was your kind of takeaway from the event? Yeah, I think there are a lot of different things. Something, obviously the black market and problem family is always a topic conversation throughout the year, but, there was definitely a lot of different talking points that

I'd not considered before. One for me was around the affordability checks that are coming into place. UK gamblers is just in terms of what's the next step if someone does a failing affordability check. think someone described it as like a blunt instrument on one of the panels. And yeah, there's not really that sort of like next step of each one does fail that affordability check, whether they go next and what's in place to make sure that the next step is in the black market. Yeah. And we're going to focus on

Andrew McCarron (02:22.86)
two panel sessions really that was at the event. And that's the lived experience ones where Victor, you're going to kind of talk quite a bit about this. And then after the break, we're going to talk about fake games. But before we do, I actually, this is where I normally give a shout out talk to even I will give a shout out talk to me, but I actually want to give a shout out to deal me out because this was the first event that came up the first summit that I've attended from them. And they really did put on a great informative summit and

That's the key, we always say content is kink. So, deal me out. Congratulations and well done on the great Black Market Prevention Summit. It really was a great show. And now we go on to OptiMove. OptiMove, another shout out. You are our main partner in the iGaming Daily Podcast. You are the number one CRM solution for the iGaming market. And we continue to thank you for your support. Okay, on that, lived experience, Victor.

This was the first panel session after the chair welcome titled Racing with Lived Experiences. And it was Mark Potter and Simon Haworth from IC360. Give us a brief overview before we get kick into it of what the panel session was about. The overview that I can give you guys is that those two people mainly focused on, they come from a problem gambling background. First, second, they're both

former professional sports players. So they really touched upon the interconnectivity between the sports world and problem gambling. You would be surprised how many connecting points there are between the two. But leaving their professional career on the side, really struck me was the things that they have to say. I have to say that it was a really heavy topic.

to listen to at 10 a.m. in the morning. Really insightful one, but really heavy one. And you're about to find out why, because the things that I'm gonna tell you that I've heard are honestly heart-wrenching. And you don't often get the chance to hear about problem gambling in such details from the people that actually experience it. there is almost every company talks about

Andrew McCarron (04:50.808)
Preventive measures, reducing the rates of problem gambling, safer gambling initiatives, et cetera, et cetera. But being, hearing from the source, from the well itself, gives you a completely different perspective. So I'm going to dive straight into it. Before you do, think actually let's just hear from Mark Potter because Kristian, you'd catched him just after the panel session. And this is what he had to say very briefly.

I think the regulated market has got to become a more appealing place. I think we've got to get affordability right. Currently, I think there are certain things that need to get better. I think education in terms of what risky behaviours are and what aren't. Education in what sites to use and what not to use. I think the lived experience community has got to come together with betting operators, regulators and the trade bodies to find a common ground because if they don't...

every idea, every opinion will be biased to that said body. So I think it's about coming together and making it a fair and transparent industry and therefore making the black market a less appealing place to be. Okay. Sorry, Victor. So if you want to kind of just jump into what you were going to say. So I was going to say that obviously the individuals who suffered were there with us yesterday at the conference to tell their story as you heard, but

The things they share left me with the impression that not everyone gets that lucky when they leave their gambling disorder untreated. So some of the key highlights that really stood out for me were that one of the guys, I think it was Mark Porter, who said that at one point in his life, he was so deep into problem gambling that he had to steal to fuel his problem gambling habit. It was something in the span of eight.

thousand pounds stolen from from his employer and he spent that money on gambling. I'm not sure if he managed to turn that into a profit, but it is a crime to do that. So you can imagine how much problem gambling affects your psyche that someone who might never have thought of committing a crime that bad habit drives him to commit such doings. of course with stealing money or

Andrew McCarron (07:12.918)
Getting debts of course comes with the dangers of being chased by loan sharks, which was another prominent point into these people's personal lived experiences. They were chased by loan sharks. One of them said that he had to hide his family away, hide his baby because they were put in danger as a result of this bad habit being left untreated. Also,

Another thing was that in order to get more money, because you're constantly in that pursuit of funding that habit, one of the gents stole or took his wife's engagement ring and sold it for like 500 quid or something like that to go gamble with. This life of stealing and having your moral compass in a bad place leads to, of course, trying to hide it, trying to show the world that

You don't have a problem trying to hide what you're actually doing. And one of these actions from what I've heard involved waiting for the postman to come in, taking the bank statements from him, hiding it from your family, which you can imagine having to time every day that the postman comes for you to be outside and do that. It's just horrible moving money from between accounts so that

your significant other doesn't find out that money is missing. Suicidal thoughts, the final destination of that bad habit, if you may. So a lot of things that you have to take into consideration when you're talking about solving problem gambling and what it can lead to. Yeah. I think you've reeled off pretty much a lot of the worst things that a problem gambler will go through to funnel a habit. And I think it expresses

the importance, I'm not expressing this, it amplifies, sorry, that's the right word, the importance of these conversations happening. it also highlights the importance of the consumer actually knowing the difference between a regulated market and the black market or an unregulated market, is another word for it. This is where these conversations certainly on Monday came from. The consumer, they tend to not know the differences. And once they realize

Andrew McCarron (09:39.662)
that the regulated markets are there to protect them. It's there to kind of steer them in the right direction and aid them in any problem gambling issues that they may have. It's a better world for it. But you've reeled off a lot of the negatives there, Victor. Let's, before we go to an ad break, let's just kind of spin some positives from what you took away from the conference. One of the other things that people might consider positive, the takeaway was that operators can actually

work on their advertising to combat problem gambling and the harm that comes with it. One tip that I actually thought was ingenious was for operators to actually advertise the way they protect their customers, the way that the safety measures in place that they have to help the customers prevent those harms rather than advertising the actual product.

In reality, I think that this could potentially raise the trust in the operator itself significantly more and therefore reduce the stigma around problem gambling and urge the player to reach out to the operator early on so that we don't have stories like the above ones. Perfect. Right. We're going to take a quick ad break, but when we come back, Christian, you're going to talk us through the fake games panel that you sat on.

And then we're also going to listen to a interview that you did with Dan war from regular partners. Welcome back. As I mentioned, just before the outbreak, we're going to look at fake games now. And Christian, this was a panel session that you sound, um, can you just give us an overview of who was sitting on the session and an overview of the topic of the discussion? Yeah. So it was, um, Duncan Wavy from CasinoReview.com. Someone has been on this podcast recently talking about the rise of fake game and also Jack.

Crabtree from GameCheck. GameCheck are someone that works with legitimate slot developers to try identify where counterfeit games have been sort of like ripped off from them developers so they can create like a bank that users, that players can go to to find out if the games they're using are legitimate or they are one of these fake games. But I think the main sort of insights from the conversation was just around.

Andrew McCarron (12:00.014)
Like how sophisticated these fake games are coming now, whereas in the past you could look at things like the code of the game and things like that to understand if they are fake. Whereas now they're becoming sort of sophisticated that consumers don't really have much of a chance of understanding if they are a fake game or not. As we mentioned in the first part, that a lot of consumers aren't aware of the black market and the regulated market. So from that, what chance do they really have to then identify a fake game within that unregulated website that they may be on?

We'd, well, you, Kristian, not we, you'd managed to grab a quick word with Duncan after his panel session. And this is what you have to say regarding fake games. When we talk about fake games, we are not simply talking about an off-brand version of whatever product. No, these are fundamentally different. They are designed to look and trick the player into believing they're playing a legitimate game. But the engine behind

that game is set to cheat them. So yeah, we're certainly trying to raise awareness of this risk and we're trying to encourage discussion around the subject of what can be done to mitigate this risk. That's what Duncan had to say. And Kristen, how does this conversation, how does it help combat the issue on provide assurances for the consumer? I think especially if you look at what Game Tech are doing,

It just means that consumers will have a lot more faith in the games they're playing. If there is that body out there that has worked with the game developers to verify the games they are playing. So they know that when they're putting the money in the slots, they're paying out in a fair manner and at the rate that they advertise to be. think obviously this has a lot more consequences than these other examples. But if you look at like the sort of design and training industry or designer clothing industry, there's this rise in people who do verify if the clothes you are buying or the trains you are buying are

real or not just because of the amount of fear like Garmis in the world. And then obviously the consequences are a hundred times greater. If you are playing a fake game in terms of the money you could lose rather than buying fake goods. Having something there that can verify these things just makes consumers have that peace of mind that they can enjoy the game without worrying that they're going to lose their money unfairly. And there was another interesting quote from Duncan that we're going to play now.

Andrew McCarron (14:26.976)
And again, this is kind of his approach of what he thinks should be happening to eradicate and prevent consumers from entering or playing these fake games. So yeah, this is Duncan's thoughts on that. We need to start shining a light on this. We need to change our approach and see if we can find another viable strategy. But yes, education is going to have to become part of that. That means that we need to do better.

at communicating to consumers about how they differentiate between a licensed and an unlicensed operator. It means we need to do better at communicating to consumers what the risks are when they go unlicensed because what we're talking about with fake games aren't just, it's not an Aldi version of a netting game. No, these are rigged games. These are games that are

set up to cheat the player to take their money as quickly as possible. If consumers understood that they don't have a viable chance of winning when playing a rigged game, that would make a big difference. to round off, Kristin, what was the kind of the future thinking now moving forward regarding these fake games and combatting them? Yeah, I think

like Duncan mentioned in the, which is that it's all about education really in terms of developers and what they can do to protect themselves from getting their games ripped off by these bad actors and also the consumers as well. Having that greater understanding about the dangers of interacting with these games. And it's just about not shying away from having that conversation now with the fears that the wrong people hear about it. We've too long as Duncan said,

It's sort of something that hasn't been spoken about, but I think now is the time to have that conversation that I hope will raise an awareness. And if our listeners want to watch the full interview with Duncan Garvey, it will be on SBC's LinkedIn page and on the YouTube and news websites in the near future. Well to our listeners, thank you for listening to us today and joining us on the Black Market Summit Prevention Roundup. But before you do go, we do have an interview with Dan Ward from Regulus Partners talking about the rental lobby from last week.

Andrew McCarron (16:46.35)
Hi, my name is Christian Lee, business journalist for XBC Media and today I'm joined by Dan Warr, partner at Regulus Partners. We've had a really interesting talk on the RET level and its implementation. How will transitioning the distribution of funds to the NHS for sort of research into problem gambling and treatment and prevention, how do you think that will change the sector? Well, it could change it dramatically. If we start with treatment, which historically has been the biggest recipient of funding through the RET system.

Treatment has historically been conducted by charities. Organizations like Gordon Moody have been doing it for more than half a century, GammCare for about a quarter of a century. They are now being thrown into complete uncertainty about whether they're going to be able to carry on operating because they will have to apply to the NHS for the money that used to come direct to them under the voluntary system. They are also being suggested or told that they cannot go out and receive

their traditional funding from gambling operators. the idea seems to be to make them dependent upon the NHS with no certainty about whether they'll get any money out of the NHS. And how important is it that that first sector doesn't get left behind given the expertise it's gained over the last so many years in leading the way in terms of research and problem gambling? Well, it's critical again from a treatment perspective, I think.

that the third sector has provided about 85 % of the treatment and in previous years even more than that. So you are talking about potentially destabilizing the vast majority of treatment services in this country. In other areas, there are organizations that conduct harm prevention work. In fact, some of the treatment providers have and they're to shut down those services. So areas like training for gambling industry employees, for

around safer gambling, these programs are being shut down. So we're seeing all kinds of unintended negative consequences or potentially intended consequences arising from this lobby. just to finish off in the past, you've been quite scathing about OHID, so describe it as prohibitionist. How will their involvement in the whole problem gambling research sector, are you optimistic for that or just another cause problems?

Andrew McCarron (19:02.382)
So I think there's one good thing about OHID being involved and that is that they are a public body, so they can be scrutinized. We can use various techniques to scrutinize them to make sure that they are being open and doing as they're meant to do. But I think, I mean, this is an organization that has proposed annual tax increases above the rate of inflation on the industry, which is in essence a prohibitionist measure. They've also touted the idea of plain packaging for gambling and that means

no colors, images or logos on any gambling products, which include things like a deck of cards. So they have said publicly that they want to take the same approach to gambling as they have done to tobacco. That's a clear statement of prohibitionist intent. So we should be very worried that they have been given a mandate and a pot of money to go out and pursue this. In terms of their research, we saw with their work on the economic costs of gambling harm.

that they have very low standards of quality and arguably low ethics in producing statistics on things like serious matters like suicide with really no care and no sort of attention to what people might think is accurate. Yeah, I think it's definitely concerning time for prayers. Like I said, the first act as well. There's a lot more questions and answers at the moment. Thanks for joining us today.

Enjoy what time, little lot of time left to the talk. Cheers. Tristan.