According to court documents, a gambling addict who stole £340K ($432K) from his company repeatedly requested to be barred from Betfair but was instead given VIP treatment. He was given free hospitality at athletic events during that time, and he was permitted to lose almost £1 million ($1.27 million) over a number of years.

According to The Guardian, former finance manager Andrew Morford was given a two-year suspended prison term on Wednesday after he admitted to stealing the funds from the nonprofit housing company Co-operative Development Services (CDS).

According to court records, Morford embezzled money from CDS between May 2019 and February 2024.

Judge Silas Reid stated that Morford's gambling problem played a "very big mitigating factor" in his decision to issue a lenient sentence.

Exclusions Repeatedly

Morford initially requested to be permanently self-excluded from Betfair in 2008, three years after he started using the platform. Despite the operator following the rules, he was able to establish a new account by just registering as "Andy" instead of "Andrew."

Two years later, in 2010, he re-excluded himself but reversed his decision and lost £659K ($837K) over the next five years.

Morford was able to establish a new account in his father's name and lost hundreds of thousands of pounds more, even if Betfair terminated his account in 2017 due to "worries about his betting."

According to papers submitted in court, despite these red signals, Betfair's internal description of the account was that it was at the "low end of medium risk." Even in August 2022, when he signed an email to his VIP account manager using his actual name, the operator missed several chances to recognize Morford.

He repeated this in March 2023. A staff member looked up the name in the company's database and found that the player had previously avoided self-exclusion.

Prior to Betfair eventually freezing the account, Morford lost tens of thousands of pounds more and deposited more than £550,000 (about $699,000) even after this discovery.

Betfair is thinking about selling off its assets

In addition to GamLearn, a nonprofit that helps gambling addicts who have broken the law, CDS is now requesting that Betfair give back the money it made from Morford's gambling losses.

Now that the criminal process has ended, Betfair, a Flutter Entertainment company, stated to The Guardian that it would examine the situation.

"We have an established divestment process, to which this case will be subject once criminal proceedings have completed,” a spokesperson said, adding that the company takes player safety seriously.

According to the spokesman, Morford "impersonated his father on several calls with our teams, including safer gambling contacts where he promised us that he was in control of his spending and gave papers in his father's name."

Morford was the subject of a civil lawsuit brought by CDS, which led to the recovery of £575K ($730K), with a portion of the payment coming from his £100K ($127K) pension and his £110K ($140K) share of the family home.