Betting company Betfair has admitted it could have done more to protect a father-of-two who took his own life while suffering a “pervasive” gambling addiction, an inquest has heard.
Luke Ashton died at the age of 40 on April 22 2021, leaving behind a wife and two children, after online gambling “consumed” him and saw him lose £5,000 in one month alone just before he took his own life.
A hearing at the coroner’s office for Leicester and South Leicestershire on Wednesday was told Mr Ashton had previously gambled up to 100 times a day, including early in the morning and late at night when his wife Annie was in bed.
In 2019, he had fallen into debt after taking out £18,000 in different loans and gambled in a bid to try and clear what he owed.
Although the debts were cleared relatively quickly through the sale of their home, Mr Ashton’s gambling on a number of different websites increased, spiking in March 2021, just before he took his own life.
One of the main operators used by Mr Ashton since 2012, Betfair, which is owned by Flutter UK & Ireland, has been named an “interested person” in the inquest – the first time a gambling company has been involved in such proceedings.
On the second day of the inquest, Richard Clarke, managing director at Flutter with responsibilities for customer experience and customer relations, admitted their systems at the time did not flag Mr Ashton as an at-risk gambler.
Speaking of the model the company uses to detect the levels of risk among their customers, Mr Clarke told the inquest how the “machine learning algorithm” tracks 277 separate pieces of customer data each day.
He said the model is designed to detect behaviour among customers that is similar to those who have, in the past, decided to “self-exclude” themselves from using the Betfair website – essentially locking their account for a minimum period of six months so they cannot access it to give themselves a “break”.
The model analyses data such as the amount of money the customer is spending and whether there are any spikes in their activity.
Mr Clarke admitted their model did not, in 2021, detect Mr Ashton, who had himself decided to “self-exclude” himself on occasions in 2013, 2014 and 2016, as being high risk.
If he had been flagged as being at-risk, a number of actions could have been taken, including a phone conversation between Betfair and the customer to discuss gambling behaviour or even a permanent ban on an account.
While confident the company complied with the regulatory framework in place at the time, Mr Clarke said: “Looking at Luke’s activity in March 2021, it does look like we should’ve done more. Looking at the tragic outcome we have here, we would have loved to have done more.
“Things have changed a lot since then.”
Looking at Mr Ashton’s activity on his Betfair account, the court heard how he almost exclusively used their Exchange platform, which Mr Clarke said was generally more low risk and used mostly by “sophisticated and highly-skilled” customers.
He had mostly placed bets on horseracing and greyhound racing both in the UK and overseas.
Despite agreeing with barrister Jesse Nicholls, who is representing the Ashton family at the inquest, that Betfair could have done more to protect Mr Ashton from harm, he pointed out his activity on the site was “fairly consistent” until it started to spike in early 2021, but that he was not flagged as meeting the high-risk threshold at the time.
The court heard how Mr Ashton was averaging a maximum of 55 bets per day in January 2019, with March 2021 being the peak of his activity with 1,229 bets placed. On one day alone that month, he deposited £2,500.
Mr Clarke said, however, that looking at the data from some of their busiest days in March 2021, there were around 10,000 customers who were placing more bets than Mr Ashton was.
He added it is not unusual to see customers spending more money in March compared to other months because that is when horseracing season starts.
However, a customer in Mr Ashton’s circumstances would not now be able to repeat the same pattern of betting due to a number of changes that have been implemented since 2021.
A strict monthly net deposit limit is imposed on every customer who returns from self-exclusion as part of a detailed phone-based assessment and the limit cannot be changed by them.
Financial vulnerability checks have also been put in place using a leading third-party credit reference agency to check for a history of bankruptcy, county court judgements, short-term loans and other markers of financial vulnerability.
They have introduced a mandatory £500 per month deposit limit for all under-25s because the age group is statistically more vulnerable, and also introduced a £10 maximum stake limit on online slot games.
Mr Nicholls, for the Ashton family, said it was their view that Betfair should have enforced an exclusion on Mr Ashton’s account.
He said: “Sending emails were the only things you did in Luke’s case. Your model missed exactly what it was supposed to identify.”
However, Philip Kolvin KC, representing Flutter, asked Mr Clarke if it was possible that some problem gamblers could “slip through the net” of the model, to which he responded: “Absolutely.”
The inquest continues on Friday.
