The UK Gambling Commission (UKGC) have announced a penalty to Stakelogic for breaching product design errors. See the official announcement from the UKGC below:
Stakelogic BV, which runs games on other operator’s websites and apps, ran slots games faster than the minimum time gap of 2.5 seconds between spins.
An investigation was launched after Stakelogic reported to the Commission that its game Tiger Temple 88 was found to have operated with 1.97 seconds between spins, breaching the minimum time standards.
Following a Commission investigation, the Licensee conducted re-testing of its entire portfolio of games offered to the GB market. This revealed that a further 15 games were found to be in breach of the minimum time gap requirements.
These games were found to be between 0.001 seconds to 0.675 seconds below the minimum 2.5 seconds standards, with many found to have operated at 0.042 seconds or below the cycle requirements set out in the Commission’s Remote Technical Standards (14D).
Tiger Temple 88 was non-compliant between 28 May 2025 to 30 May 2025 and the remaining 15 games were running too fast during various periods between 31 October 2021 and 30 October 2025.
During the Commission investigation it was revealed the errors were caused because Stakelogic were measuring the timeframes inaccurately due to their reliance on using a manual stopwatch to test compliance with the remote technical standards.
John Pierce, Director of Enforcement and Intelligence, said: “With all the technological resources available to an online gambling business, it is unacceptable that Stakelogic were relying on a manual stopwatch to measure the speed of their games.
“After reporting this error to the Commission, Stakelogic immediately self-suspended the use of the affected games until the error had been rectified. They have subsequently taken significant steps to assure the Commission that they now have robust policies and procedures in place to prevent future breaches from occurring.
“We would urge all operators to take careful note of this case and ensure they have effective testing practices in place to ensure they are meeting all the standards we require.”
Minimum online slots speeds were introduced in 2021 as part of a wider package of measures designed to reduce the overall intensity of gameplay and protect consumers from harm. Research showed that fast game cycle speed is associated with increased risks to the consumer.
Stakelogic will pay the money as part of a regulatory settlement with the Commission
July 06, 2026
Stakelogic BV to pay £122,835 for running slots too fast
October 26, 2025
Unibet Owner Fined £10 Million Over AML Failings
A gambling business will pay a £10 million penalty after a Gambling Commission investigation revealed Anti-Money Laundering (AML) and social responsibility failings.
Platinum Gaming Limited – which operates unibet.co.uk and uk.bingo.com – will also receive a warning and have to undergo a third-party audit to ensure it is effectively implementing its anti-money laundering and safer gambling policies, procedures and controls.
Social responsibility failures included:
- employing a customer interaction system which failed to identify a player as at risk of harm despite the player losing £5,000 within 24 hours of registration and going on to lose more than £16,000 in less than three months.
- not interacting with a consumer who lost over £31,000 within nine months, hit their monthly loss limit on six occasions, and demonstrated markers of harm associated with high velocity gambling.
- not identifying a consumer who exceeded their £2,500 loss limit within 16 minutes of registering their account as potentially being at risk of harm. The operator also failed to identify binge gambling.
- not interacting with a customer during a 23-day period in which they staked £73,000 and lost £4,100.
Anti-money laundering failures included:
- the Licensee’s money laundering/terrorist financing risk assessment failed to take into account customers whose account(s) had been closed by the Licensee due to money laundering or terrorist funding concerns prior to 2023. This enabled some customers whose accounts had been blocked to open new accounts and gamble.
- the AML policy in place at the time lacked clarity around the level of customer due-diligence and enhanced customer due-diligence measures conducted and how this was determined by the level of risk displayed by a customer.
- despite being covered in the Licensee’s risk assessment, there was no evidence that potential high-risk factors such as high-risk occupation, high levels of transactions through deposits and withdrawals and a high level of loss, had been considered when customer reviews were undertaken.
This is the second occasion Platinum Gaming have faced enforcement action – in 2023 they were fined £2.9m for social responsibility and anti-money laundering failures.
John Pierce, Commission Director of Enforcement, said: “While industry wide progress has been made in reducing unchecked high spending, the failings at Platinum Gaming are particularly disappointing. The case revealed serious shortcomings in customer interaction systems, including failures to identify and act on clear markers of harm. These included consumers losing thousands within hours or days of registration, repeatedly breaching loss limits, and exhibiting patterns of binge and high-velocity gambling without appropriate intervention.
“Significant anti-money laundering failures were also identified. These included gaps in the licensee’s risk assessment, which failed to account for previously blocked accounts linked to money laundering concerns, and a lack of clarity in the AML policy around due diligence thresholds. Customer reviews did not consistently consider high-risk factors, despite these being outlined in the licensee’s own framework.”
He continued: “Alongside the £10 million financial penalty this operator is required to conduct a follow-up independent audit and internal investigation – providing regular updates to the Commission. These added conditions are designed to drive meaningful change, reinforce accountability, and embed a culture of compliance.
“Senior leaders must take ownership of compliance outcomes and ensure lessons are embedded across the organisation, supported by structured reporting and board level oversight – and further regulatory activity will remain a possibility.”
October 03, 2024
The ultimate gambler? How Denise Coates became Britain’s richest woman
Any motorist or dog-walker traversing the narrow lanes around Denise Coates’ home in Cheshire would most likely stray within range of one of the many CCTV cameras that jut out from the surrounding foliage. These towering hedgerows, interrupted by sturdy security fences, hide not a military base or a top secret research facility but a family home, albeit one of immense proportions.
The 21-hectare (52-acre) estate is large enough to accommodate landing space for the helicopters that neighbours have seen ferrying people in and out. Inside the gates, there is a lake, boathouse, tennis courts, horse stables and a treehouse with a zip wire, according to local planning applications and architectural plans.
The owner of this complex is Britain’s richest woman and the multi-billionaire mastermind behind the Bet365 online gambling empire. Coates’ renown is such that one expert says people in the gambling industry rarely even refer to Bet365, but simply “Denise”. “It’s an indicator of her almost mythical status,” says Alun Bowden, a gambling consultant at Eilers & Krejcik Gaming, which provides research for the industry. “Nobody tries to copy her, because there is no point. You can’t. She’s unique.”
Coates’ status has not deterred unkind comments from some neighbours. One says her home looks like a Tesco Extra superstore. No, says another, it’s “more like an Aldi depot”.
All in all, the house and grounds in which Coates, her husband and their five children live are estimated to have cost close to £90m. Building began in 2019 and did not stop until this year. The project was overseen by the practice of renowned architect Norman Foster, the man behind London’s Gherkin, Wembley Stadium and Berlin’s Reichstag. It hasn’t won Coates too many friends in the area. Months of road closures have infuriated drivers and horse-riding enthusiasts. One local, who described the work as a “pain in the arse”, says: “At least she retarmacked the road – but she could have brought round a bottle of wine.”
Still, there were millions on the table for neighbours who were willing to sell up. Coates spent more than £8.5m buying surrounding land so she couldn’t be overlooked – and many local farmers took the money. However, Coates is shrewd. One neighbour says they ended up in a stalemate with her after refusing a bid for their land. “She’s a clever woman,” they said. “She’ll offer more than it’s worth but not 10 times more.”
However, other than those directly affected by Coates’ building work, there aren’t many people in and around Stoke-on-Trent with a bad word to say about her. Stoke is an agglomeration of six towns that once sat at the heart of the global pottery industry, home to Wedgwood, Portmeirion and Spode. Ceramics delivered prosperity to the region in the 18th century, while coal and steel brought more growth as the Industrial Revolution progressed. But the slow decline of British industry saw the boom times vanish and Stoke declined with it. The emergence of Bet365 has been one of the city’s rare recent success stories.
Bet365 “directly and indirectly” supports about 12,000 jobs in the city, says Mark Gregory, a former chief economist at global accounting giant EY, who was born and raised in Stoke. His estimate includes jobs at Stoke City football club, which is owned by Coates’ brother John. That’s about “10% of employment”, he says. “And because it’s a higher-wage company, even more than that in terms of value.”
“They’re a huge generator of wealth locally,” says Jeff Nash, who owns the local office and hospitality complex Potbank, on the site of the former Spode pottery factory. “If you’re a graduate, you can look at Bet365 and want to stay in Stoke. That’s the future.”
Andy Jackson, who runs creative agency i-Creation from an office in Potbank, praises the work Coates has put in to improve maths skills in the city, including funding for a scheme to attract maths teachers in partnership with the council. “She was really clear about 10 years ago that for Bet365 to have a talent pool to work for them, numeracy was important. They put their money where their mouth was.”
But perhaps the most reputation-enhancing investment the Coates family made was when they bought Stoke City FC for £1.7m in 2006. It has always been very much a family affair: Peter was joint chairman with Denise’s brother John, until a restructuring that saw John take full control of the club this year. Denise’s husband, Richard, is responsible for the stadium and training ground. The family’s smart stewardship and financial muscle helped elevate Stoke up a division to the Premier League in 2008, where they stayed for a decade before relegation in 2018. The Coates family does not just bankroll the team – it even pays for free travel for fans who want to attend away games.
Few of those fans will have followed Stoke for longer than 81-year-old Nigel Johnson, a former schoolteacher turned football commentator who covered Stoke for the BBC over more than five decades until his retirement last year. Johnson says he is grateful for the “fantastic amount of money” that the Coates family has pumped into the club he loves.
Denise Coates was born and bred in the Stoke area, and the seat of her family power remains here, in the shape of a sparkling, 2,400-seat headquarters proudly displaying the Bet365 name to passing traffic, as it rises from the centre of a sprawling complex that also includes a training centre.
Coates was 33 when she began building her online betting empire in 2000 from a portable building in a car park in the city. Within a few years she transformed the British gambling landscape, recognising that the future lay not in high street bookies but online – allowing users around the world to place bets at any hour of day or night, every day of the year. Perhaps her biggest coup was Bet365’s development and perfection of in-play betting, a product that invites punters to wager in real time on minute-by-minute action, such as who will win the next corner in a football match, or the next point in a game of tennis. It is now the most ubiquitous form of online gambling.
It has certainly made Coates rich. Together with her family, the 57-year-old is estimated to be worth £7.5bn, according to the latest Sunday Times Rich List. She is almost as famous for her record-breaking pay packets as her entrepreneurial talent. In 2021, she took home £469m. This year, it was £271m. In total, she has extracted about £2.5bn in pay and dividends from the company.
Denise was, from a young age, very good with numbers. David Owen, who taught Coates maths in the 1980s at Sandbach High School, told the BBC that she was a “top-of-the-range” student. “If we were talking Mensa, she’d be in the top 1% … She was going somewhere.”
Her father, Peter, the son of a miner, was a moderately successful local businessman who made his money in the catering industry, serving up burgers and pies to hungry fans at football stadiums (Coates’ mother, Deirdre, is a director of the family catering business now). Peter also owned a string of betting shops – Provincial Racing – where Coates worked during her holidays. It was here that she honed her business acumen, working as a cashier and gaining an intuitive understanding of how bets were priced and what kept punters coming back.
She graduated from the University of Sheffield with a first-class econometrics degree and returned to Stoke, where she sought to move her dad’s gambling business online. She bought the domain name Bet365.com from eBay for $25,000, borrowed £15m against the Coates family’s bricks-and-mortar stores, and invested it all in sports betting technology.
By 2005, Bet365 had sold off its high street shops – for £40m – to focus entirely on its web offering, which would expand beyond sports betting to casino games such as roulette and digital slot machines. The timing could not have been better. First, Labour introduced a broadly permissive overhaul of Britain’s gambling laws in 2005, triggering a surge in marketing and advertising that dragged betting out of the realm of smoke-filled bookmakers and firmly into the mainstream. The arrival of the smartphone – the iPhone hit the market in 2007 – would soon put a casino in every pocket.
Before long, Bet365.com was bringing in punters in their droves, leaving established but slower-moving rivals such as Ladbrokes and William Hill struggling to catch up. In the 2006-07 financial year, the last before Labour’s reform of gambling laws took effect, Bet365 booked revenues of £91m. By 2012, the year Coates was awarded a CBE for services to the community and business, they had reached £648m. Last year, it soared past the £3bn mark. Savvy marketing helped it along its way, especially the ubiquitous slots during football broadcasts, featuring the actor Ray Winstone, who began urging fans to “Bet in play, now” in 2009.
The company no longer discloses how many wagers are placed on its products, but the last time it did, in 2018-19, £64bn worth of bets were made worldwide in just one year. The Gambling Commission estimated the total volume of all online wagers placed in Britain that year at £118bn.
Head just one mile north of the Bet365 headquarters on the A53 and you will come to the West Midlands Gambling Harms Clinic. Here, wedged into a few low-ceilinged rooms of a community health centre, experts sift through the human wreckage left behind by companies such as Bet365. There may be more than a million people with a gambling problem in Britain, including 55,000 children, according to estimates. Punters’ losses, worth £11bn a year to the gambling industry, are disproportionately skewed towards more economically deprived areas, such as Stoke.
The clinic in Stoke opened in October 2022, part of a nationwide rollout of new NHS clinics for people suffering from addiction and other gambling-related harm. Demand for their services has risen dramatically in recent years. During the Covid-19 pandemic, the NHS warned that it was being left to “pick up the pieces” of the gambling industry. Experts have been particularly vocal about the boom of online gambling, in particular in-play betting and products such as digital slot machines, which are designed to deploy an arsenal of psychological tricks to boost profits.
“These features have been called ‘addiction by design’,” says Prof Heather Wardle of the University of Glasgow, one of the UK’s leading experts on gambling-related harm. “The features which make these games so immersive are the same features which make them harmful.” According to Citizens Advice, some 18% – or 3.3 million – of online gamblers in Britain are in debt, owing £10,000 on average. In 2021, Public Health England estimated that there are 400 gambling-related suicides each year in England alone: more than one every day.
I meet Mark on a Zoom call at the Stoke gambling harms clinic, where he is a client. He is in his late 30s, and came into some money after he and his ex-wife divorced and sold their home. He had always gambled in bookmakers but during the pandemic, when shops were shut, he started gambling online, something he’d never done before. He soon found that the online experience was far more intense. “It’s the casino in your pocket that never goes away. You can do it on the toilet, at work, on your lunch break, at home while watching TV, in bed when you wake up. So Covid didn’t help because I needed the escape.”
For a gambling problem to start to become an addiction, “you need time, you need money and you need opportunity,” he says. “Now I had all three, it was a recipe for disaster.” The exact amount Mark lost over the course of 18 months, is irrelevant, he says. “It was tens of thousands, but if I’d had a million I’d have gambled that. I would lose a month’s salary in a few minutes.”
At the time, he and his new partner were each saving for a deposit on a house together. Mark lost the lot. Telling her that the money was gone was “the hardest thing I’ve ever done, including watching my dad die. Her initial reaction was shock because she didn’t understand. Not one single other person knew … Gambling wants you on your own. It was the dirty little secret.”
Clinics such as the West Midlands one where Mark is being treated have a colossal task on their hands to mop up the industry’s collateral damage. The annual budget for all 15 new NHS clinics is just £6.75m. Or, to put it another way, less than a day’s worth of revenue at Bet365.
Sammy, also in his late 30s, is another client here, and a former customer of Bet365, among other operators. Sammy grew up surrounded by gambling, whether it was horse racing, 2p pushers at the funfair or fruit machines in the pub. But it was online casino games that tipped him over the edge. “I opened accounts in my mum’s name, my dad’s, my brother’s. I had credit cards with different limits,” he says. “When you’re a gambler, you’ll find a way.”
Sammy’s particular favourite was online games of blackjack – he loved the thrill of winning or losing within a matter of seconds. “ I remember the excitement of having £5,000 at the tip of my fingers. I used to kid myself that I could turn it into £50,000.”
Like many gamblers, Sammy tried to quit. But gambling companies know what works to retain customers. One of the most controversial tactics online businesses offer is “free” spins and bonuses. “They’d do everything and anything they can to keep you gambling. And you think it’s fine because you’re not using your own money, but then you do start using your own money.
“I joined about 20 to 25 companies because they’d match your deposit. My thought process was that if I join 10 companies and deposit £50 into each, I’ve doubled my money straight away. And that’s how they entice you in.”
One month, Sammy used his month’s salary to build up winnings of about £2,000. Inevitably, he lost it. “I used both mine and my wife’s wages to get it back. And then I lost that. I remember thinking: I’ve got no funds, I’m going to have to tell my wife. There was nothing left for the month … I’d have to take out another loan.” It was a Sunday night and his wife was giving their two young children a bath. “My heart was pounding out of my chest. I thought: ‘It’s now or never.’ I couldn’t find another way out. I just said: ‘I’ve got a gambling addiction.’”
Sammy is benefiting from treatment at the West Midlands clinic but still finds it hard to escape the relentless bombardment of gambling adverts. A massive Liverpool FC fan, he is surrounded by club memorabilia when we speak online. He believes he sees more gambling advertising because of his online activities. “I see it on Twitter all the time – famous footballers doing ads for bookmakers. You think you can get away from it, but it’s everywhere. Join now and get a bonus boost, or whatever.”
The gambling industry, and Bet365 in particular, has targeted football relentlessly. Gambling adverts saturate TV, radio and podcasts and scroll relentlessly across pitchside hoardings in stadiums. Most clubs now have an official betting partner and some have even taken a cut of fans’ losses under commercial arrangements with sponsors. The demographic, young and male, also happens to be the cohort most likely to suffer from a gambling addiction – not just the fans but the players, too.
Some players have no choice but to wear betting companies’ logos on the front of their shirts, despite several high-profile cases of star footballers – from Michael Owen to Wayne Rooney – speaking publicly about their struggles with gambling addiction. Nowhere is the symbiotic relationship more evident than at Stoke City FC, which is owned by the Bet365 group and plays at the Bet365 stadium, where the players run out with Bet365 emblazoned across their chests.
Bet365 may be hard to escape in Britain, particularly for football fans, but Denise Coates keeps a much lower profile. The last time Britain’s most successful businesswoman gave an interview was to the Guardian, 12 years ago. She does not often make public appearances or speak at business conferences. Bet365 is a private business, so there are no annual shareholder meetings. The rare times she is seen are in publicity images announcing donations made by her charity, the Denise Coates Foundation. And so this vacuum of information has been filled by myth-making.
One oft-repeated line features an Aston Martin DB9 sports car, with a personalised number plate, that is sometimes spotted in the Bet365 car park. The car appears in almost every written profile of Coates, a totem for a billionaire’s apparent flamboyance. However, according to one person close to Coates, who has asked not to be named, the story is “completely untrue”. The car does exist, but it is not hers – it’s a close family member’s. “She likes being anonymous,” says the source. “The idea she’d have an Aston Martin with DC365 on the numberplate, driving around Stoke, is so far opposite of what she’s like. She’s a very low-profile sort of person.”
In many ways, Coates is a woman of multiple contradictions. On the one hand, she is a poster child for corporate excess, with her staggering pay packets. On the other, she is one of Britain’s biggest taxpayers – choosing to put most of her vast income through Bet365’s payroll rather than hiding it away from tax authorities like many other billionaires.
To some, she has built her vast fortune creating and marketing blatantly addictive gambling products, shattering the lives of punters and their families. And yet she puts a considerable amount of her company’s profit into charities and her local community, funding school numeracy programmes and generating high-paying jobs in a city that lacks alternative sources of wealth and skills.
She is known as a formidable entrepreneur who, in a male-dominated industry, can easily “hold a room of grown men”, according to one source. And yet those who have worked for her for decades say she is a considerate manager to her employees, and “genuinely cares about them and supports them”.
Her politics, too, might surprise some observers. Coates is not the type to pontificate on politics, according to one person who knows her. However, records show her father and companies within the Bet365 group have given a combined £480,000 to Labour over the years, starting with £50,000 in 2004, the year before Labour finalised the details of the Gambling Act. More recently, Peter Coates gave £25,000 to Starmer’s leadership campaign.
In the months leading up to the UK’s Brexit referendum in 2016, Bet365 gave £512,500 to the campaign for Britain to remain in the EU. Neither the Coates family nor the company has spoken publicly about this donation.
Bet365 has made friends in the Conservative party, too. In 2022, the then Stoke-on-Trent North MP, Jonathan Gullis, was forced to apologise to the chair of a Westminster Hall debate on gambling harms after admitting not only that he was reading directly from a Bet365 briefing paper in parliament, but also that he had failed to declare £540 worth of tickets he had received from the company that year to see Stoke City play Fulham in the Championship, a competition sponsored by another betting company, SkyBet.
Aaron Bell, formerly the Conservative MP for Newcastle-under-Lyme, had an even closer relationship with the company. He worked for Bet365 from 2006 until he won a parliamentary seat in 2019 – and called for caution over proposed reform of the gambling industry in parliament, until he stood down in 2024.
During the same Westminster Hall debate on gambling-related harm, Bell insisted that he was “not a spokesperson for the gambling industry” but went on to list Bet365’s virtues, including its record of going “above and beyond” on safer gambling measures, its roots in the Stoke community and Coates’ tax contribution.
The family’s tax bill is something of a source of pride – and potential political leverage. The company’s submission to a select committee inquiry in 2023 read: “Our founders are the second highest taxpayers in the UK.” Not everyone is impressed by this. As Scottish National party MP Ronnie Cowan put it in the Westminster Hall debate: “If I earned a billion pounds, I would make sure I paid my tax as well.”
While Coates and her family had dropped to third place on the most recent Sunday Times tax list, they are still estimated to have paid £376m to the exchequer last year. A sizeable chunk of that contribution comes from Coates’ enormous pay packets, which she puts through Bet365’s payroll, meaning she gets taxed at the 45% additional rate of income tax.
“That is very different from many of Britain’s billionaires,” says Luke Hildyard, director of the High Pay Centre. “That said, that level of wealth remains unsettling. It’s far beyond what any reasonable person might consider a fair or proportionate reward or incentive for business success.”
Liz Ritchie and her husband, Charles, set up the charity Gambling With Lives in 2018 after they lost their son Jack to suicide when he became addicted to gambling, first in bookies and later online. The charity seeks to help other people bereaved through gambling addiction and is a key campaigner pushing for reform to online gambling.
“Addiction underpins the industry’s business model,” says Ritchie. “The most addictive products, such as online slots, are aggressively marketed, and income from these has grown by 8.5% over the past year. Meanwhile, gambling suicides continue every day. How have we ended up in a situation where gambling companies thrive by putting the public in such danger?”
Despite being in recovery from gambling addiction, Sammy says he still gets “loads of text messages from gambling companies. I have to delete and report them. It feels like your phone is being tracked or monitored.”
Indeed, many gambling firms have fallen foul of the Gambling Commission regulator over their apparent failure to use the wealth of information they hold about people like Sammy to prevent harm. In 2022, SkyBet was fined £1.2m for sending promotional messages to gamblers who had signed up for a voluntary self-exclusion scheme to block themselves from betting sites.
Bet365 has felt the wrath of the regulator less often than many of its rivals, but it is not blameless. In April, it agreed to pay £582,120 for failures in its anti-money laundering and social responsibility checks – which included a failure to deploy its technological prowess to stage “meaningful” interactions with customers who might be suffering harm.
“You’re supposed to be a loyal customer,” says Sammy. But gambling firms “don’t give a toss about you. They just want you to keep playing.”
Coates has established a reputation as a very generous woman. The Denise Coates Foundation was set up in August 2012. According to the charity’s regulatory filings, she has put about £752m into it. Recipients of the foundation’s cash include Stoke’s Douglas Macmillan hospice (known locally as the Dougie Mac), numerous medical research and treatment projects, disaster relief funds and university bursaries for people from economically disadvantaged backgrounds.
There are artistic endeavours, too. The New Vic theatre in Newcastle-under-Lyme, just outside Stoke, is a regular beneficiary, while Coates also funded Tate Britain’s purchase of four watercolours by the women’s rights campaigner Sylvia Pankhurst, marking the centenary of women’s suffrage in 1918. London’s Courtauld Gallery features a space that bears Denise Coates’ name.
Charities addressing gambling-related harm are not listed among the beneficiaries of the foundation’s largesse, however, although Bet365 does fund such services through other means, including a voluntary industry levy.
Some recipients of the foundation’s charity are close to home. At least £700,000 has gone to the Hassall Green Nature Reserve in Cheshire. Keele University and the Sandbach Gymnastics Foundation both boast a Denise Coates Foundation Building, the name of their benefactor writ large on the external walls. Coates may abhor the spotlight but where her philanthropy is concerned, she is less shy about leaving her mark.
Coates’ foundation has donated several times to the Catholic Agency for Overseas Development (Cafod), the official aid agency of the Catholic church. One person who has spent time with Coates says they have never seen her display any outward sign of religious sentiment, but her grandfather Leonard, a veteran of the first world war, was a Catholic. The Catholic Herald lists Peter and Denise Coates among the faith’s “leaders of the day”.
The Denise Coates Foundation has actually donated a relatively small proportion of its reserves – about £78m – since 2013, while amassing an endowment fund of £730m through cash injections from companies in the Bet365 group. In its accounts, the charity puts this down to a policy of ensuring that it earns enough through investments to make sure the charity is self-sustaining and not “dependent on donations from any one source”. That point of self-sufficiency might have been reached sooner, were it not for the fund losing £26.8m in the last financial year as a result of the poor performance of its investments.
The foundation’s strategy is unlikely to be called into question, though. Every one of its trustees is a member of the Coates family, or one of their employees.
The charity may come with more benefits to Coates than the warm glow of altruism. Her philanthropy may have helped save the Bet365 group £140m in tax, far more than the foundation has yet donated to good causes.
Where next for Coates? The Bet365 juggernaut certainly shows no signs of slowing down. From that portable cabin in a car park, Coates has pieced together an empire that stretches from Stanley Matthews Way in Stoke to Sydney, with offices in Frankfurt, Bogotá and Sofia. Now, she has her sights set on perhaps her biggest conquest yet: the US.
The growth of US sports betting has been meteoric since 2018, when the Supreme Court overturned a 1992 federal law that had essentially banned the practice. Predictably, Coates moved fast – Bet365 is now available in 10 states with a combined population of more than 85 million people. Some analysts have predicted that California, one of 12 states where sports betting remains illegal, would be a bigger market than the whole of the UK. The Coates territory has plenty of room to grow.
Bet365 refuses to disclose the geographical breakdown of its earnings, claiming it would be “prejudicial” to its interests. But as one person familiar with the company’s operations put it: “If you don’t have to declare the geographic breakdown of your business, why would you?”
In 2014, Bet365 appears to make significant income from China, categorised as a “grey” market in the gambling industry, because betting is a criminal offence there. Indeed, some Bet365 customers had been arrested after apparently placing bets on the Bet365 website, while bloggers who promoted the company were jailed.
The company faced no repercussions, perhaps because, as Bet365 pointed out at the time, it does not have any physical assets or staff in China. And, as a digital business with cross-border reach, it is able to stay well out of the range of any effort at enforcement action by Beijing, which has cracked down hard on domestic betting businesses.
Meanwhile, Bet365 continues to recruit Chinese speakers for its call centres in Stoke, according to job adverts posted online. It appears to look after them well, too. Land Registry records show that the company owns a vast property empire in Stoke, comprising more than 71 separate land titles, some of which are residential addresses where, according to locals, some of its imported personnel are housed. With China offering more than 1 billion potential customers, housing for a few call centre staff may be a small price to pay.
This approach – identifying a lucrative goal and then going hell for leather in pursuit of success – epitomises the ethos that has underpinned the Denise Coates story. “It’s what Bet365 do: they are like a patient, aggressive poker player,” says Bowden. “They think long and hard, and when they make their minds up that this is a good value bet, they go all in.”
Coates herself put it more succinctly in her 2012 interview: “We were the ultimate gamblers, if you like.”
October 03, 2023
West Ham's own sponsor Betway reported suspicious activity that prompted FA probe into Lucas Paqueta after spike in bets from near Rio de Janeiro on him to be booked against Aston Villa in March
West Ham's shirt sponsor Betway were responsible for reporting the suspicious betting patterns that caused the collapse of Lucas Paqueta's proposed £85million transfer to Manchester City this week amidst an FA probe into alleged breaches of gambling rules.
Betway's integrity alert system was triggered by a series of bets they received on the Brazilian midfield player to be booked in West Ham's Premier League match against Aston Villa on 12 March, which they immediately reported to the International Betting Integrity Association (IBIA), a global group of hundreds of bookmakers responsible for policing irregular betting in the gambling industry.
Paqueta was shown a yellow card with 14 minutes remaining of the 1-1 draw at the London Stadium, leaving Betway liable to pay out the winning bets. After receiving the integrity alert the IBIA reported the matter to FIFA who then passed it on the FA, who have begun their own investigation.
The suspicious bets in question are understood to been traced to Paqueta Island in Guanabara Bay, near Rio de Janeiro, which is where Paqueta grew up. Whilst their main offices are in London, Malta, Guernsey and Cape Town, Betway have a market presence in Brazil, where they take a large number of bets on football and Esports in particular.
Although the precise figures remain unknown the volume of money staked on Paqueta to be booked against Aston Villa appears to have been significant as his price to receive a yellow card had collapsed to odds-on before kick-off, despite the fact that he had only been booked three times previously by that stage of the season. The 25-year-old was subsequently booked by Chris Kavanagh for a late challenge on John McGinn, the only booking of the game.
Betway's involvement in reporting the bets may be a source of embarrassment at West Ham and the Premier League, who last season introduced a voluntary ban on gambling sponsorship on the front of shirts that will begin at the start of the 2026/27 campaign. The online gambling company have sponsored West Ham since 2015 in one of the biggest shirt deals in the Premier League outside the Big Six that is due to come to an end in 2025.
The £10million-a-year deal has not been without controversy however, with Betway fined £400,000 by the Gambling Commission last season for inadvertently advertising their products on the Young Hammers page of the club's website in a breach of industry rules.
Betway were also fined £11.6m in March for failing to carry out sufficient affordability checks on their so-called VIP customers who often gamble heavily, although that was not related to West Ham.
May 25, 2023
Paddy Power Betfair charged £490,000 for self-exclusion marketing
April 11, 2022
Sisal May Join Camelot in Contesting UKGC Lottery Operator Selection Process
October 23, 2020
Betsson Announces UK Brand Closures
March 12, 2020
Gambling firm Betway hit with record £11.6m penalty
The Gambling Commission said Betway failed to check the source of funds of one customer who deposited over £8m and lost over £4m in a four-year period.
It also failed to effectively interact with a customer who deposited and lost £187,000 in two days.
The penalty package is the biggest to date faced by a UK gambling firm.
The Gambling Commission's investigation said the failings were linked to dealings with seven of Betway's high-spending customers.
It said that "as a result of a lack of consideration of individual customers affordability and source of funds checks, the operator allowed £5.8m of money to flow through the business which has been found, or could reasonably be suspected to be, proceeds of crime".
The commission said the investigation had also revealed "inadequate management oversight", adding that a probe "into responsible Personal Management Licence holders" was continuing.
"The actions of Betway suggest there was little regard for the welfare of its VIP customers or the impact on those around them," said Richard Watson, executive director at the Gambling Commission.
"As part of our ongoing programme of work to make gambling safer, we are pushing the industry to make rapid progress on the areas that we consider will have the most significant impact to protect consumers," he added.
"The treatment and handling of high-value customers is a significant piece of that work and operators are in no doubt about the need to tackle the issue at speed."
January 15, 2020
Reaction to UK Gambling Credit Card Ban
According to Gambling Commission Chief Executive Neil McArthur, the commission’s Tuesday decision should “minimise the risks of harm to consumers from gambling with money they do not have.”
Dr Mark Griffiths, Distinguished Professor from Nottingham Trent University, shared his views on the possible consequences of the decision.
He said: “I’ve been researching in this area for 32 years now and one of the things that’s always concerned me is the idea that gamblers can gamble with credit and money they haven’t got. I mean the move to ban credit cards being used for gamblers, I think, is a positive move. Obviously, people can still use their debit cards, at least with debit cards, it’s usually money they’ve got in the first place, but obviously, with credit cards, this is something that, traditionally, people don’t necessarily have the money to do it.
“I think one of the reasons that the gambling commission wanted to introduce this is they’ve done their own research and they said that 22 percent of online gamblers that use credit cards for online gambling were actually problem gamblers, and that is obviously a lot higher amongst that particular group, and we find across the general population, this does seem to be a move that they’ve got the interests of the problem gambler at heart.”
He added that although the issue of problem gambling will not be eliminated through these measures that it is a “step in the right direction” and encourages the gambling industry to consider their harm minimisation policies on problem gambling.
Mr Griffiths said: “Well, I certainly think the industry, now they know if they want operating licenses, they’ve got to show what they’re doing in terms of player protection, harm minimization, responsible gambling and social responsibility. By that I mean their duty of care to their customers. Obviously, gambling, just like tobacco and alcohol, it’s a consumptive product, which, at the end of the day for a small minority of people can cause problems.”
Adam Bradford, co-founder of the Safer Online Gambling Group, said: “This is excellent news and it will provide an extra layer of support for people who are addicted to gambling.
“It has been a long time in coming and we are glad the Commission have acted decisively on this matter.”
Gambling firms saw their shares slide in reaction to the new legislation to ban the use of credit cards for online bets when the markets opened yesterday.
Online specialist 888 saw shares slide 3.3 per cent, William Hill shares fell 3.2 per cent, Ladbrokes owner GVC Holdings dropped 2.8 per cent and Paddy Power owner Flutter sank 1.4 per cent in early trading.
July 31, 2019
Ladbrokes Coral fined £5.9 million
The Gambling Commission stated that over a three-year period, Ladbrokes Coral failed to put in place effective safeguards that would “prevent customers suffering gambling harm”.
As part of its verdict, it citied one customer who had lost £98,000 and had asked Coral to stop sending further promotional communication. This customer had 460 attempted deposits declined but were still able to lose this sum of money two and a half years later.
Another customer spent over £1.5million over three years, accessing their account 10 times a day and losing £64,000 in a four-week period. Yet despite this, nothing was done to prevent them from accessing the site.
The Commission stated that Coral “did not ask the customer to evidence their source of funds and could not provide evidence of any social responsibility interactions being carried out”.
However, the firm failed to carry out “social responsibility interactions”.
The problems are said to have occurred between November 2014 and October 2017, after GVC Holdings had bought Ladbrokes Coral.
As a result, they will now pay £4.8 million and divest £1.1million “gained from customers as a result of failings”.
Richard Watson, executive director of the Gambling Commission, said: “These were systemic failings at a large operator which resulted in consumers being harmed and stolen money flowing though the business and this is unacceptable.”
November 22, 2018
Report on Youth Gambling by UKGC Paints an Inaccurate Picture
Earlier this week, the UKGC came out with the Young People and Gambling 2018 Report, which claimed that around 14% (450,000 individuals) of children aged 11 to 16 spent their money on gambling activity, just a week prior to taking part in the survey.
The reported figure is 2% higher than what was reported in 2017. However, the UKGC itself stated that the number was very low when historical standards were taken into consideration. For instance, in 2011, it was found that 23% of youth in the UK indulged in gambling.
Similarly, the new study also pointed out that 1.7% of the surveyed youths were problem gamblers, an increase of 0.9% compared to 2017, and that 2.2% were at risk of becoming problem gamblers, up from 1.3% in 2017.
However, it must be considered that a larger number of respondents had taken part in the survey this year, which allowed the UKGC to acquire a more accurate picture.
As for children who spent money gambling in the week prior to the survey, 39% had spent £2 or less, while 29% spent £10 or less. An estimated 15% stated that they have spent over £50, which placed the weekly average at £16.
However, spending, in this context, does not necessarily equate to losses. The consideration of potential winnings was left to the respondents’ interpretation.
According to those who reported gambling last week, 6% engaged in private bets with friends, 4% engaged in purchasing National Lottery scratch cards, 3% used fruit machines at pubs/arcades, and another 3% reported playing cards (for cash) with friends.
Only a mere 1% reported that they participated in real money gambling, online or otherwise.
Minors are prohibited from accessing fruit machines at pubs/arcades. However, older reports indicate that some pubs/arcades were failing to enforce the rules. Though the maximum stake permitted is £1, the UKGC warned that not all pubs/arcades were adhering to this.
The statistics for online gambling participation among youth fell by a point to 6% in the last 12 months. It has been reported that 2/3rds of participants had engaged in online gambling with their parents’ permission.
In conclusion, the UKGC seems to have gone overboard with its goal to protect children from gambling. However, if the above statement is to be believed, the onus is not to be placed exclusively on the operators – parents/guardians have a role to play as well.
June 22, 2018
32Red handed £2 million penalty for failing to protect high-staking customer
Between November 2014 and April 2017, the customer was allowed to deposit a total of £758,000, without the appropriate social responsibility and money laundering checks carried out.
Instead of checking whether the customer needed help with their problem, it was revealed that 32Red staff instead applied bonuses to the customer's account – despite 22 instances indicating he was a problem gambler.
The customer had told staff they were frustrated with their losses, and were chasing them. They also expressed concerns about the amounts they were spending.
It was revealed during the investigation that 32Red failed to check that the customer could afford their level of spending.
The customer's account was not reviewed until January 2017, as a result of unusual play suggestive of possible problem gambling – a seven-figure win, which was instantly replayed.
Gambling Commission executive director Richard Watson said: "Instead of checking on the welfare of a customer displaying problem gambling behaviour, 32Red encouraged the customer to gamble more – this is the exact opposite of what they are supposed to be doing.
"Operators must take action when they spot signs of problem gambling and should be carefully reviewing all the customers they are having a high level of contact with.
"Protecting consumers from gambling-related harm is a priority for us and where we see operators failing in their responsibility to keep their customers safe we will take tough action."
August 31, 2017
888 to pay almost £8m for 'failing vulnerable customers' and addicts
The Gambling Commission on Thursday said that, due to a technical failure in 888’s systems, over 7,000 customers who had chosen to self-exclude from their casino, poker or sports betting platform were still granted access their accounts on 888’s bingo platform.
Self-exclusion is a facility offered by gambling sites for people who have decided that they wish to stop gambling – in some cases because they fear they have become addicted – for at least six months and wish to be supported in their decision to quit.
The commission said that in 888’s case, the issue went undetected for “a prolonged period of time” which meant that customers were able to deposit a cumulative total of £3.5m into their accounts, and then continue to gamble, for over 13 months.
888 did have a self-exclusion procedures in place, but their system was “not robust enough and failed to protect potentially vulnerable customers”, the commission said.
“Safeguarding consumers is not optional. This penalty package of just under £8m reflects the seriousness of 888’s failings to protect vulnerable customers,” said Sarah Harrison, chief executive of the commission.
In addition to the overarching charges, the commission also said that 888 had failed to recognise “visible signs of problem gambling behaviour displayed by an individual customer, which was so significant that it resulted in criminal activity”.
In that particular case, the customer staked over £1.3m, including £55,000 stolen from an employer.
Over more than a year, the customer placed a significant number of bets and gambled, on average, three to four hours a day.
“The lack of interaction with the customer, given the frequency, duration and sums of money involved in the gambling, raised serious concerns about 888’s safeguarding of customers at-risk of gambling harm,” the commission said.
"The 888 sanction package will ensure those affected don’t lose out, that the operator pays the price for its failings via a sum that will go to tackling gambling-related harm, and that independent assurance will be given to see that lessons are learnt,” Ms Harrison said.
The £7.8m sum includes repayment of the £3.5m of deposits made by those customer who had chosen to self-excluded and it also includes compensation of £62,000 to the employer from whom money was stolen in that one particular case.
The commission said that a further £4.25m would be paid to a socially responsible cause with the idea that it helps finance measures to clamp down on gambling-related harm.
For “future assurance”, the commission said that it had also ordered an independent audit of 888’s processes relating to customer protection.
888, in a statement, said that it fully cooperated with the commission throughout this process.
It said that it “regrets the historic failings highlighted by the review and accepts the conclusion of the review”.
It also listed a number of changes and improvements that have been put in place to prevent similar occurrences in future.
“The review process has pushed 888 to enhance its responsible gambling technology and policies and leaves it well placed to continue to succeed in an environment where it will engage with customers in a way that those customers and regulators will demand going forward,” the company said.