Gambling operators targeting Australian gamblers with increased texts and emails

[The Buzz]

As new public gambling advertising restrictions come into effect in Austrailia, private messages in the form of texts and emails from betting operators are on the rise.

Dr Alex Russell, a senior postdoctoral fellow in the Experimental Gambling Research Laboratory at Central Queensland University, asked 98 sports bettors and 104 race bettors to complete daily surveys for a week. On average, each sports bettor received 3.7 emails and 2.3 texts during the week, while the race bettors received 6.5 emails and 4.3 texts on average.

From his article in The New Daily:

We also asked them how much they had bet in the past 24 hours, and how much they intended to bet in the next 24 hours.
This allowed us to compare their intended expenditure with their actual expenditure, and whether any differences between the two were related to certain types of direct messages.

Our results suggest emails made people think about betting, but texts were more likely to make people actually do it, at least within the next 24 hours.

And we know that people who are most vulnerable to gambling-related harm often have accounts with multiple operators, and are far more likely to receive a high number of such messages.

We should expect text messages from gambling operators to increase. And for some obvious reasons: They are effective and relatively cheap. Think about your smartphone. You may receive emails all the time, but do you disregard most of them? Marketing statistics suggest only about 22 per cent of emails are opened. In contrast, we open the majority of our text messages, and more quickly. Clearly, text messaging is a good way for gambling companies to make you react.

But private messages also offer features that are not available in more public advertising, like television or billboard ads. In particular, they can be tailored to the person. We call this behavioural insights or behavioural tracking, and gambling operators are beginning to use it.

Gambling regulation is always a cat-and-mouse game. Restrictions are brought in, and operators find ways to get around them.

Most of the restrictions on gambling ads have focused on those aired during televised sporting contests, partly because kids watch and partly because they are so abundant.

But we need to step up regulation on private advertising. Otherwise, we’ll find gambling operators sliding regularly into our private messages, raising the potential for further gambling harm.

Read the article here: https://thenewdaily.com.au/life/scie...text-messages/

[Former Member 14]

They're just playing catch up...

Casinos who once were able to accept AU players, since the IGA banning, must have sold their AU player bases, or done deals with casinos who run the gauntlet, and still accept AU players. Since most casinos left en masse in Sept 2017, my mobile has been inundated with bonus offers and alike, from some pretty shady casinos.

First these txt's were from a phone number, now they use some program to obfuscate the sending number, replacing that with words like: Winner, Freebies, LadyLuck, and so on...

TBH was a pain the ass, receiving up to 3 of these a day.

BUT...

Since updating from Samsung to Huawei, this phone employs a spam blocker, not solely on a phone number like Samsung, but also on words too. Hence, I've added all the usual BS marketing crap, and to date, these unwanted, not subscribed to BS casino spams, are a thing of the past.


Edit:
Another reason in, a very long line of unethical actions this industry seems to relish for. This is exactly why the online gambling industry, has/is coping heat these days. The dodgy-actions and bad choices of this same industry, are the cause of their own demise...

[universal4]

Smart phone spam is a serious issue that has infiltrated many industries, nit just gambling, and it is only going to get worse, until the carriers start taking action to limit the spoofing of numbers.

Remember how bad email spam had gotten before the filters improved? Wait until there is a longer history of numbers being sold and traded.

Rick
Universal4