A young life ‘dominated by gambling’: Victorian coroner delivers stinging findings on death of 22-year-old
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Kyle Hudson was “a young man brimming with promise”, with a loving and supportive partner, family and friends, and prospects.
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“It was a near ideal picture – except for the grip that online sports betting had upon him,” the Victorian coroner Paul Lawrie said on Tuesday.
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Lawrie, delivering his findings into the 22-year-old Werribee man’s death, said Hudson’s online gambling was “the direct and paramount causative factor underlying his decision to take his own life” on 6 July 2021.
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“Kyle’s case reveals, in the sharpest relief, the human cost of online gambling,” Lawrie said.
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The inquest, held in May, examined the immediate circumstances and likely contributing factors to Hudson’s death, his personal and financial history, his online gambling history, and whether some of Australia’s largest betting companies accurately assessed Hudson’s risk of gambling-related harm in the years prior to his death.
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Hudson opened his first online gambling account with Sportsbet on his 18th birthday in 2017. He gambled $895,733 through Sportsbet and other online betting platforms run by Entain and Bet365 over four years, with the last bets placed hours before he took his own life.
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Hudson’s online betting was also the “indisputable” direct cause of the breakdown of his relationship with his longtime girlfriend, Ashley Baker, in the days immediately preceding his suicide, the coroner found.
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“Her account of the decline of their relationship makes clear the corrosive effect of Kyle’s gambling,” Lawrie said.
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The coroner, at times becoming emotional, was scathing of an “extraordinary” submission made by Sportsbet, with whom 85% of Hudson’s gambling had occurred.
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Sportsbet had argued that the court had not seen sufficient evidence to conclude Hudson had been suffering from gambling harm.
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“It is chilling that this is Sportsbet’s view,” Lawrie said.
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Hudson made bets on 110 of the 187 days in the last six months of his life, averaging 9.2 bets for each betting day. Over the four years he gambled with Sportsbet, Hudson had triggered behavioural alerts within the company’s systems on 37 occasions – once every six weeks on average, with the first occurring within two months of his 18th birthday.
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The betting companies told the inquest they believed at the time that Hudson was “betting within limits” and that he never met their highest risk threshold, though representatives from Entain and Bet365 acknowledged in evidence that, with all the facts in view, Hudson appeared to have been suffering from gambling harm.
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“Sportsbet maintains that Kyle was not suffering from problem gambling,” Lawrie said.
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“I do not accept this proposition. The analysis of Kyle’s betting activity detailed above presents a startling picture of a young man whose life after age 18 was dominated by online gambling.” Hudson had engaged in problem gambling throughout much of the four years, and “as a consequence, he suffered significant gambling harm, which increased as time progressed”, the coroner found.
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“The impact went far beyond the money Kyle lost.
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Online gambling had taken over so much of his life. This is made crystal clear in the astonishing measurements of his betting activity,” he said. Hudson sustained an overall net loss of more than $47,000 through gambling, a forensic accounting analysis had shown, but the coroner found it would have been difficult for Hudson to have known precisely how high his tally of losses was.
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The coroner recommended the federal government change the consumer framework to require online betting companies to prominently display customers’ net financial position over time in their accounts. Hudson redeemed 489 inducements over the four years he was gambling.
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There could be “little doubt” that the promotions and inducements Hudson received over the years “catalysed Kyle’s betting behaviour” and had a “contrary and corrosive impact” on the effect of any of the gambling companies’ safer gambling efforts, the coroner said. Gambling companies provided the details of their advertising budgets to the court confidentially, under a claim of commercial sensitivity.
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Lawrie did not reveal those figures, but on Tuesday described them as “a level of expenditure on gambling advertising in Australia that is arresting”. “It is close to impossible to move through the modern world without being exposed to [gambling] advertising,” Lawrie said.
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“Kyle did not decide out of nowhere to open his first betting account on his 18th birthday … There can be little doubt that Kyle began his online gambling as soon as he could because he was primed by the phenomenon that was swirling about him before he turned 18.” He recommended the Australian government consider further restrictions, including prohibitions on advertising for online gambling, and establish a national online gambling regulator to oversee licensing, safety, gambling harm interventions and data collection.
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He also recommended the government establish and fund an independent “data vault”, which he said had been introduced in various European countries, and allowed for better regulation of online gambling companies.
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This vault would hold standardised gambling data, which gambling companies would be compelled to provide, and mechanisms to allow for thorough independent research on gambling harm and gambling safety.
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There were “critical and obvious deficiencies” in the current system of monitoring and intervention for online gambling harm, which lay mainly with companies themselves, and relied on partial data and, sometimes, verbal assurances from a customer that they were betting safely, the coroner said. Hudson’s case “should be a clear signal that we cannot leave monitoring and intervention solely in the hands of the betting companies”, Lawrie said.
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