London — When Gregg finally stopped gambling in late 2018, he
was in a dire financial position. He had lost nearly $15,000 during a
nine-month betting binge, on top of two outstanding loans totaling more than
$70,000 and a mortgage of more than $150,000 on his small home in Britain.
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Now he is on a hunt to know whether his favorite gambling app,
Sky Bet, knew about his problems and still tried to hook him.
Records show that Sky Bet had what amounted to a dossier of
information about Gregg. The company, or one of the data providers it had hired
to collect information about users, had access to banking records, mortgage
details, location coordinates, and an intimate portrait of his habits wagering
on slots and soccer matches.
After he stopped gambling, Sky Bet’s data-profiling software
labeled him a customer to “win back.” He received emails like one promoting a
chance to win more than $40,000 by playing slots, after marketing software
flagged that he was likely to open them. A predictive model even estimated how
much he would be worth if he started gambling again: about $1,500.
Gregg learned about the behind-the-scenes tracking after he
hired a lawyer and took advantage of Britain’s data protection laws, which
require companies to share with people what personal data they hold about them.
He wanted to know if Sky Bet had profiled and targeted him even as he tried to
quit gambling.
He shared the documents with The New York Times on the condition
that his full name not be used, out of concern that the details would imperil
his career and sever relationships with family and friends. Sky Bet, which
declined to comment on the record for this article, did not dispute that the
records were authentic.
As gambling apps explode in popularity around the world, the
documents show how far one of the gambling industry’s most popular apps has
adopted some of the internet’s most invasive tracking and profiling techniques.
Instead of using data to identify and help problem gamblers like Gregg, critics
of the industry said, information is used to keep players hooked.
Gambling apps like Sky Bet make it as easy to wager as to order
an Uber. Many people view them as an innocent diversion. But to a group of
gambling addiction experts, data-privacy activists and industry critics in
Britain — home to the world’s largest app gambling market — the documents offer
a warning to players and regulators in countries like the United States, where similar
services are growing rapidly. More than a dozen states, including New Jersey,
Nevada and Virginia, now allow app-based gambling.
The critics say the companies behind the apps require more
oversight, and they are calling for tougher laws to identify problem gamblers
and prevent data from being used in underhanded and predatory ways.
“Wherever gambling companies operate, there should be a real
understanding about how data is an integral part of the business,” said Ravi
Naik, a London lawyer behind the effort to obtain Gregg’s data. “When we start
to look inside the vault, as we are here, then we see how vulnerabilities are
laid out to the platforms.”
Naik said the data obtained thus far was just one piece of the
puzzle. He has filed additional legal motions in Britain trying to uncover more
details about what gambling companies do with the collected data, and if it is
used to customize offers and create other inducements to lure customers,
particularly the most vulnerable players. A House of Lords report published
last year said 60 percent of the gambling industry’s profits came from the 5
percent of customers who were “problem gamblers,” or at risk of becoming so.
“We’re trying to get transparency,” Naik said. “It shouldn’t
take this much work from lawyers to figure out what’s going on.”
Sky Bet was the most popular gambling app in Britain last year,
downloaded roughly 140,000 times per month, according to the market research
firm Apptopia. Once controlled by Rupert Murdoch’s British media company, Sky,
it is now owned by Flutter Entertainment, which owns a number of casino apps
and generated about $7.4 billion in revenue last year.
Nigel Eccles, a former chief executive officer of FanDuel, now
owned by Flutter and one of the largest gambling apps in the United States,
said online gambling companies conducted extensive data-analysis work to
identify their best customers. The companies see how much the people are
betting and try to predict what will get them to spend more. But he said
gambling companies were in a delicate position because their best customers
might also have gambling problems.
“It’s not that they have access to this data — it’s what they do
with it,” said Eccles, who now runs a chat service for sports fans. “If you use
that data in a way that you know, or should know, is harmful to your users,
then that’s a serious problem.”
Naik, who previously helped uncover data misuse by the political
consulting firm Cambridge Analytica, was contacted last year by Gregg, who was
seeking help getting copies of data from Sky Bet and companies it used to
profile users.
The data that he and Naik obtained included a 34-page breakdown
of his financial history from a company called CallCredit, which conducts fraud
and identify checks for Sky Bet. It contained information about his bank
accounts, debts and mortgage, with details down to monthly payments. In bold
was a loan default in March 2019.
Another company used by Sky Bet, Iovation, provided a
spreadsheet with nearly 19,000 fields of data, including identification numbers
for devices that Gregg used to make deposits to his gambling account and
network information about where they were made from.
TransUnion, a large American credit scoring agency that owns
CallCredit, Signal and Iovation, said that it complied with data protection
laws and that gambling platforms used its services in a number of ways,
including to detect fraud and money laundering.
Britain has been at the forefront of online betting. In 2020,
the gambling app market in Britain totaled $7.3 billion, nearly double the
next-largest market, Japan, according to Global Betting and Gaming Consultants,
an industry research group. This week, four of the top five free sports apps on
Apple’s App Store in Britain are gambling related. The companies own and
sponsor soccer teams and dominate advertising during televised sporting events.
The country is at the center of the global debate about
regulating the new generation of betting apps. The government has opened a
review of gambling laws that will include the consideration of new rules for
data use and affordability checks, according to the agency conducting the
review.