A man with a gambling addiction earns a 4-year prison sentence

Before being a criminal, Andy was a senior manager at a clothing firm in Norwich. At some point, he fell into a gambling addiction, and he felt the need to continue feeding it throughout the years to the moment where he bit of much more than he could chew. May made £50,000 annually at his previous job, so he definitely wasn’t desperate to take extreme measures such as stealing money.

Where did Andy steal such massive mounds of cash from? His job, of course. For quite a while, May was able to sneak away £1.3m that didn’t belong to him from his own workplace and went on a lengthy gambling spree on online casino sites. Andy has been making disproportional bets since 2017.

Andy made such ginormous bets into the gambling sites that it should have raised some red flags for the operators instantly. At times, May was depositing as much money at once as he would make at his job in a year. But of course, not all casino owners are fair, and many will let such incidents fly under the radar.

Andy managed to lose £600,000 on Betway casino over the course of two years, and the operator did not bother to request proof of income. But it all changed when May got down to £116,000, and he was asked for information that would show where that money is actually coming from. As a joke, Andy created a fake document on Microsoft Paint and submitted it to the casino. Shockingly enough, they accepted it and allowed him to keep doing his thing.

Betway, among other gambling sites bamboozled by Andy, returned the stolen money to avoid any further troubles. Andy May, on the other hand, won’t be getting away with what he’s done so easily. Earlier this month, he stood before the judge and got a rightful sentence of four years in prison for £1.3M fraud. Not worth it at all, especially considering that he lost all of his funds to online bets.

Operators are now advised to do a more thorough job of checking players’ credentials and do a better job of checking documentation - especially when large amounts of money are going in and out of their online casino. Operators are also required to implement a “single customer view” system. There they will have to disclose customer details to improve the quality of checks and ensure that they’re not a part of yet another financial fraud.