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When I began reporting on the gambling sector in 2015, I didn’t have any preconceptions about the industry. After all, it rarely seemed to make front-page news.

One reason for this, I would later learn, is that problem gambling and addiction often fly under the radar, not just at a societal level but even within close-knit families.

Craig Williams’s £100 bet prompted an inquiry by the Gambling Commission and fury within the Conservatives

• Rayner, Mordaunt and Farage set for fresh general election debate clash – politics live
• Sunak aide’s bet: what are the rules?

Bookmakers have been asked by the Gambling Commission to trawl through all substantial bets placed on a July election after one of Rishi Sunak’s closest aides put a wager on the poll date just days before it was announced.

The prime minister said he was “disappointed” with the behaviour of Craig Williams, which was revealed in the Guardian , but neither would be drawn on whether they had discussed the date of the election prior to the bet being placed.

Legal firm says group failed to update shareholders on problems with bribery and corruption at its former Turkish operation

Investors could seek more than £100m in compensation from the owner of Ladbrokes and Coral for failure to update them on issues with bribery and corruption at the group’s former Turkish operation.

The planned action, led by the legal firm Fox Williams, follows Entain’s agreement to pay almost £600m – one of the largest financial penalties ever imposed in the UK – in a deal with HM Revenue and Customs finalised in December 2023 after an investigation into alleged bribery .

Enlarge / Roblox helps support sites like RBLXWild in letting minors gamble using their Robux balances, according to a new lawsuit.

A new proposed class-action lawsuit (as noticed by Bloomberg Law ) accuses user-generated "metaverse" company Roblox of profiting from and helping to power third-party websites that use the platform's Robux currency for unregulated gambling activities. In doing so, the lawsuit says Roblox is effectively "work[ing] with and facilitat[ing] the Gambling Website Defendants... to offer illegal gambling opportunities to minor users."

The three gambling website companies named in the lawsuit—Satozuki, Studs Entertainment, and RBLXWild Entertainment—allow users to connect a Roblox account and convert an existing balance of Robux virtual currency into credits on the gambling site. Those credits act like virtual casino chips that can be used for simple wagers on those sites, ranging from Blackjack to "coin flip" games.

If a player wins, they can transfer their winnings back to the Roblox platform in the form of Robux. The gambling sites use fake purchases of worthless "dummy items" to facilitate these Robux transfers, according to the lawsuit, and Roblox takes a 30 percent transaction fee both when players "cash in" and "cash out" from the gambling sites. If the player loses, the transferred Robux are retained by the gambling website through a "stock" account on the Roblox platform.

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Many years ago, Matt Blaze and I talked about getting our hands on a casino-grade automatic shuffler and looking for vulnerabilities. We never did it—I remember that we didn’t even try very hard—but this article shows that we probably would have found non-random properties:

…the executives had recently discovered that one of their machines had been hacked by a gang of hustlers. The gang used a hidden video camera to record the workings of the card shuffler through a glass window. The images, transmitted to an accomplice outside in the casino parking lot, were played back in slow motion to figure out the sequence of cards in the deck, which was then communicated back to the gamblers inside. The casino lost millions of dollars before the gang were finally caught.

Stanford mathematician Persi Diaconis found other flaws:

With his collaborator Susan Holmes, a statistician at Stanford, Diaconis travelled to the company’s Las Vegas showroom to examine a prototype of their new machine. The pair soon discovered a flaw. Although the mechanical shuffling action appeared random, the mathematicians noticed that the resulting deck still had rising and falling sequences, which meant that they could make predictions about the card order.

New Scientist article behind a paywall. Slashdot thread .