BETTING MACHINES HIGH ROLLER

 

Gambling addict tells of destruction wrought in a terrifyingly short time by fixed odds betting terminals – and battle to change his life. It took Tony Franklin just 59 minutes to squander £3,500 on high-speed, high-stakes gambling machines in his local Coral bookmakers. Losing the money was easy.

Thirteen days before Christmas, he walked up to the counter, swiped his debit card and spent £500 picking the wrong numbers on electronic roulette. Eight minutes later he took out a further £1,000, which was immediately applied to the machine as credit. He burned through that in 39 minutes, and promptly spent another £1,000. Ten minutes later and he was back at the counter buying another £1,000 worth of credit.

“I was in a fog. It was me and the machine. I threw it all away,” Franklin said, fighting back tears. “All that money was supposed to pay back debts. It was for Christmas presents. For my son, my wife.” The 43-year-old had lost almost everything he had saved in months of being “clean”. “I don’t need to be told gambling ruins lives. It’s ruined mine several times.”

In person, Franklin appears a charming rogue with a gift for one-liners. He has been successful in business: as a salesman working on commission his biggest pay cheque was £13,000 in a month. He is now penniless and steeped in debt, having blown his and his family’s cash through compulsive gambling. Over two decades or so, he calculates he has lost about £1m.

With a junkie’s urges, the only way to feed his addiction was a series of petty scams. He began in the early 2000s by bouncing cheques, then graduated to running up tens of thousands of pounds in overdrafts. The explosion of bank lending and “pre-approved loans” in the late 90s enabled him to be, at one stage, jobless but with £100,000 in credit.

Franklin’s most profitable sideline was making about “10 grand a month” by buying mobile phone contracts, paying the monthly line rentals and selling the handsets. Franklin said: “I was exploiting a loophole in the telecoms’ company marketing plans. The companies wanted customers and were basically paying you to sign up. They only woke up to it when the courier company tried delivering 500 phones to my house.” All the money he made went straight towards feeding his gambling habit.