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A gambling addict who was a manager at AMP, confessed to the police that he stole over $6 million of client funds to continue his gambling addiction which only became worse in the long run.

It’s worth mentioning that he himself surrendered to the police, and even provided proofs of the amounts that he had stolen to stop his gambling addiction, and therefore the judge sentenced him to a lighter sentence than what he would have normally received had he been directly caught.

What’s more interesting is this guy kept a spreadsheet of the money he was stealing, and he even managed to refund up to $1 million to some clients and rest were reimbursed by AMP.

Lastly what really touched my heart is that the casino where he lost lots of money offered him counselling services, but he turned it down and the casino then decided to close his account to make sure he would not gamble again.

Moral: Gambling addiction is real and harsh but stealing money to fund it is not right, please ask for help and don’t steal like he did.

Source:

https://www.pressreader.com/australia/herald-sun/20200622/281852940826600

I've always considered gambling addiction an affliction that is much worse than substance addiction. Whereas you have a limit to how much you can slam into your body and whereas your finances are depleted for the substances, there is only so much damage that you can do in one moment with substance addiction unless you're dying from it.

Problem gamblers, though... I bet their stakes go up in correlation with their external wealth, and there's no stopping it. It's pretty difficult to spend 30K on heroin in one day, but to spend 30K on a couple bets in a casino in a few minutes? You basically get rid of the buffer zone for any regret. Everything can happen instantly, and if you find yourself stealing from others to gamble... you get situations like this.

Props to this man for confessing what he did. Seemingly, all involved users that the addict stole from has already been reimbursed of the amount stolen, so really, the situation of him confessing and giving himself up could never be more beautiful than ever. It is a sad thing that it went up to $6m before he confessed, but if you looked at it optimistically, at least he confessed. This pretty much stopped future damages from occuring PLUS the company he was working for (AMP) managing to fix the problems he did quickly and efficiently.

Still, his way of stopping his addiction was going to jail was interesting to say the least. To be honest, stealing and asking for loans when one is a gambling addict almost has no difference in my eyes. It's just like you're covering up your crimes with the word "legal" which really defeats the sense of it.

Does same situation happens also years ago?when a employee spends the companies money over the years without being noticed and when the spending revealed it is already million of dollars ?

Anyway this is why we always need to asses our employees and our company's money to keep safe from this people.

Glad that he realized what he has done before doing anything worse than that. He probably wants to stop his addiction but like what other addicts experience, it's difficult for them to stop it that's why he decided to confess his wrongdoings so when he gets sentenced, he can't gambling for that time. That's the last thing he can do, it's to correct what is wrong.

I have heard a lot of stories where addicts (not only in gambling) will steal money just to satisfy his addiction. I think that's one of the worst things that addiction can do to people. But unfortunately, not all gambling addicts are like the ones you have mentioned, who will willingly try to stop his addiction towards gambling. Most often times, addicts are reluctant to admit that they are addicted to something, but will still continue what they are doing.

He is a good guy but he is just a victim of gambling addiction . Other guys are more worst because they only stole and don't surrender thier selves  . They are only waiting for their victims to report them  . Win or loose they only keep the money for them selves but this guy featured on here are returning it back and give some extra too if ever he won but because of his addiction , he will just borrow the money again to feed his gambling appetite.  Good thing that he surender early because if not , maybe more worst thing can happen to him .

A bad event into a good one.

He's honest and if he had admitted his mistake then the judge should really have considered him and giving him a lighter consequence is a good decision. He himself refunded a huge amount so he's very concern and sorry for what he'd done to his clients.

His addiction really brought him this far but his action and remorse redeemed him.

gambling addiction is a dangerous thing...
my husband's friend has a story similar to this, he borrowed money from the bank by pawning his house just to play gambling, but finally, he turned himself in to the court to be able to settle his debt to the bank, the court confronts him with the Bank and the Bank gave him a payment within 25 years. borrowing money or stealing money just to gamble is not wise, when you lose capital, you only make yourself fall into poverty.

His addiction makes him stealing money from his client, and that is the truth. But the good news is he can refund up to $1 million to his clients, although not all of the client's money. Yes, that person needs help, and I think he deserves the chance to cure his addicting. But the difficult part here is to admit his mistake by stealing the client's money, and not all people can do if they already steal the money.

We need to pay attention to this and don't let ourselves steal money for just playing gambling. The most important thing is we need to control ourselves in gambling games because we already have seen so many bad things that can happen from gambling.

It is worth to mentioned which casinos he played.


I will assume its:
(1) https://www.sportsbet.com.au/
(2) https://www.crownmelbourne.com.au/

Gambling addiction is going to be difficult to control, specially in this case if a person has accessed to tons of money. He as sentenced to five years, and I"m sure he has a lot of time to ponder.

I think he just made a safer decision.  He is already exposed and rather than hiding and getting heavier punishment, he decided to turn himself to the authority to have a lighter punishment.  A wise decision indeed.

Gambling addiction can really turn people into committing crimes. Probably this guy is on a losing streak and wanted to get back what is lost until he lost control of himself.  



He is not honest, if he is, he won't steal.  I think his action is influenced by his lawyer and the decision of the court.  I bet he wanted to get away from it if he could but then he made a wise decision by probably following the advice of his lawyer and the verdict of the court.

Gambling addiction is really dangerous.

Props to this gambler who know when to stop and when to confess his wrongdoings but still, he committed a crime and he stole funds of his clients so it would be better if he will just surrender and share all the things that he did instead of running away from authorities that may cause his life.

With what he did, I knew that they will help him. Gamblers aren't like him where he will confess all of his wrongdoings. This is a good offer by the casino by the way and anyway he can rehabilitate in the jail since he will not gamble there anymore.

This is like "Having a loan for gambling purposes".
Either way, having a loan and stealing funds aren't acceptable when it comes to gambling. Yes you can do it both but there is a greater consequences that you may face if the worst case scenario happens to you. This is also the reason why I don't gamble most of the time. I get easily addicted on different things especially in games but I can control it that easy too :D.

At least he realized that what he has done and accept punishment for his wrong doing, if he did not do this, he might get killed apart from being imprisoned for his offense, he needs to undergo a rehabilitation, he needs to cure his gambling addiction, this kind of symptoms will always comes back only until he is cured

He is working in the casino itself so its gotta be a battle for him every day thinking of gambling while he is working in the casino itself. And then he finally snaps, steals casinos funds for his addiction. He first stole $6M before deciding to stop. If he won over $6, he probably refunds back the $6M but I doubt he'd stop. He's still lucky that the casino fund for his recovery. Too nice for the casino to do that.

Is this an isolated case, there are so many gambling casinos, do these gambling casinos always check the mental health of their casino employees so they can check if things like this will happen again, being employed in a gambling casinos is a big temptation for employees to also play seeing the many gamblers winning huge amount of money.

Ah reminds me of the old day of CSGO Gambling.

When phantomlord using an item from CSGO Shuffle to betting again on their website ~LOL. There a lot of conspiracy from the owner and phantomlord, some people thought the owner is phantomlord itself.

This example just shows how heavy gambling addiction can be. I'm not saying that it's worse than alcohol or drug addiction but under such powerful influence of addiction person can't control himself anymore and can't tell what is right or wrong.
For gambling addict how to get the money for the next bet it's only goal, only thing that he's focused on. This man had the opportunity to get the money and he used it. If this could be predicted and stopped by better employee check, now it's hard to tell.

I wonder what's the situation of that gambling site knowing that one of their best customers turns out to be doing something that is illegal. The action of counseling shouldn't offered by them, as it is quite ironic that a gambling site will counsel someone addicted since in the first place, they are a business and their profit comes from these people playing and spending tons of funds just to play and satisfy their addiction.

I haven't read the whole story of how this person stole so much cash to play. Anyway, another moral of this is for the side of the gambling platform to ask or confirm where the money of the gamblers are coming from. Just to make sure they are verifying each player.

Havent heard of AMP before but since crown casino was mentioned I think I know what this is all about now.
They had a major exclusive on 60 minutes australia some time ago about the dealings under this casino there. But this was months ago so they must of just charged him with these offenses.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7HPjGZQ4w8c

update: Didn't know they had another exclusive expose from nearly a year ago about crown unmasked.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9PuHjyny9lE
Yet these are about the owners and not just one employee caught red handed.

spending 6 million dollars in gambling is something that surely addiction and no way that even if he wins more than 6 million he will refund that amount.

this serves as example for every casino owners to evaluate their employess more and expect some urge from their part .

This is the worst situation you  can encounter when some wacky idiot with gambling addiction becomes a manager and they were not able to identify the clients funds were swindled off till it reaches a really multiple millions of dollars and the damage is really huge for the company to put some irresponsible idiot as the manager. Gambling addiction is a serious issue if you are not getting help as soon as you start burning off your bank balance and if there is no control then you would end up in jail.

The only winner was the casino who get the $6M from this gambling addict. In theory if people get scammed isn't the casino fault and they are not obligated to refund the users. But we are talking about people losing a big amount of money. And for sure this will give a negative trust for that casino, maybe it isn't their fault but they should detect and stop this scammer. 

Addiction is still an addiction, no matter what kind it is. Once you are really into a certain activities, then you will really push yourself to do that no matter what happens. For me, IMO, substance addiction is much worse, it can cost lives once people are not knowledgeable about it, while in gambling addiction, you can overcome it once you control yourself and you have someone to guide you in order to limit yourself from doing it. Gambling addiction is not that easy to avoid, that's why you should do it little by little.


If someone will do anything just to steal money and spend it in gambling then he should be accountable on the consequences that may come to him. That's very unfair, you are using money that isn't yours. It is true that it is easy to spend money in gambling because the circulation of money there is extremely fast. You just place your bet and BOOM! the results are there. I encourage you not to do gambling if you don't have your own budget to spend.

Almost most of the people who play gambling are addicted in one way or the other. Some are less addicted and some are over addicted and their addiction can cause them to big loss or even their lives. People who are addicted, does not see what is right or wrong and they can cross any limit to play gambling.

Hey, this must be really a needing story for this time because I'm seeing a lot of people are severely getting addicted due to isolation times against covid19 spread. I am afraid already two of my friends got addicted to gambling up to the worst level of what we could imagine about gambling addiction. They have already started begging money for their gambling and I am not sure at any time soon they may decide to go for robbery.

I can say with 99% accurately that lots of this forum members might have already got addicted to gambling because of continuous gambling in last three months. This must be the worst consequence of pandemic situation we are experiencing right now. Only when people realize what they are doing and what they actually need to do, they might chances to get rid of gambling addiction until then their situation definitely will go worst than their current situation.

I am not surprised that news gambling addicts can cause theft of client funds, because gambling addicted can have a bad effect
to the environment and that is indeed a fact. Therefore if we feel addicted to gambling, counseling should be done immediately
to be able to control it. Hopefully by doing counseling can be cured of addictions, can even avoid not doing evil.

The fact that he stole money and kept a spreadsheet to return it made me run out of words for a bit, it's just amazing and so unusual. You can basically say he borrowed money from some of them.

Gambling addiction is indeed a grave situation especially when it gets to the point where you're starting to sell your stuff or borrow money to continue the addiction. Worst part is, many of the addicts hide their bad habit in order to continue to be accepted in the society which only puts them in an even worse situation. When you start not being able to control yourself, it might be time to ask for external help before it gets too late.

I am just seeing his confident level on his gambling about making big profits to repay. Yes, it is similar to going for loan (because he plans to repay whereas stealing means plans for repayment will be missed out) but the hilarious part is, the lenders never know that their money has gone for interest-free and terms-free loans for unlimited tenures. Really unusual but all are due to gambling addictions and its consequences.

Due to multiple reasons gamblers never open about their addictions; one of them is, most gamblers never realize that they are addicted to gambling. When they feel like they are gambling as usual as all other gamblers then they will simply continue until theu buy themselves. This is what exactly happened to that guy.

When people do change their gambling strategies frequently, they do regain confident about making profits to recover all their losses. In that situations, we cannot expect to realize their addictions and its consequences. So, they may work on getting loans to continue their gambling.

Part of it could be shame. Part of it could be delusion thereof: when you're at the point where you're continually gambling when it's not in your best interest, your mind has to find a way to create a rationale - a justification to make sense of the situation - resulting in the cognitive dissonance slowly breaking down your orthodox logic skills. After all, most people will get addicted to the randomness, the near losses, the chasing of the jackpot: while you're losing, you want to distract yourself from it and focus purely on the wins... problem gambling reaches very deeply and the worst part is that heavy gamblers only stop when they hit zero, almost getting catharsis out of the bankruptcies. 

Its really uncommon to see these kind of situations on where someone do really surrender up his self to the authority and for sure his conscience is the thing that pushes him to do so.
This would really be a common scenario if you do really let yourself fall into addiction in gambling on where if you do have business that do involves big money or even small ones then
tendency on using it up would really be on high chances.At least he's aware that he's doing too much and decided to stop via those kind of acts. $6M isnt a small amount but i do
still appreciate on what he did where he do surrender since he do committed a crime.