Sky Vegas Giving Free ‘Spins’ to Gambling Addicts

By Scott Bowen,
Editor at online-gambling.com

Scott Bowen Editor at online-gambling.com

Scott Bowen is a casino expert and editor with many years of experience in the gambling industry. He is one of the most valuable members of our team at online-gambling.com. Bowen specializes in writing on a variety of subjects, including roulette, blackjack, video poker, sports betting, and more.

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Last updated: November 17, 2021

Sky Vegas – an online gambling platform which is owned by Flutter Entertainment was reported that offers free spins targeting many UK consumers who had self-excluded from gambling.

Sky Vegas has been sending out promotional messages with a bonus of 100 free spins for every £5 played. The concern is that these messages have also been delivered to consumers who have opted out of receiving direct marketing messages. It also includes those who are picking up gambling addicts and have self-excluded from online gaming and betting sites, raising severe concerns about relapse risk for these individuals.

The event occurs during Safer Play Week in the UK, which runs from November 1 to 7, and Flutter claims to have significantly improved its Safer Play metrics. The announcement was also announced shortly after Flutter’s third-quarter business update, which included a reduction in EBITDA projections.

Sky Betting Apologizes for What They’ve Done

The operator behind the Sky Vegas brand, Sky Betting, and Gaming, was fined £ 1 million ($ 1.365 million) by the Gambling Commission in 2018 for failing to comply with its obligations to exclude gambling players from promotional marketing campaigns, apologized to anyone who was mistakenly targeted.

“We sincerely apologise to those who have mistakenly received Sky Vegas promotional communications and for the distress, this may have caused some recipients” – stated Sky Betting and Gaming.

Sky Betting and Gaming is not alone in taking this matter very seriously as the UK Gambling Commission has announced that it will examine the case regarding the operator’s violation of the license conditions.

This didn’t go unnoticed by supporters of stricter gambling regulations as the purpose of this regulation is to protect those who are vulnerable and at risk of developing gambling issues.

Former Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith called this “utterly shocking”, questioning the gambling industry’s ability to self-regulate and emphasizing the importance of the problem for individuals who are “sucked deeper into the debt vortex.” He was also concerned about the industry’s incapacity to ensure that anything like this would not happen again.

Sky Bet has been accused of sending promotional emails to self-excluded clients, according to a spokeswoman for the Gambling Commission. They promised to investigate this case in more detail.

More about GameStop

The number of people who signed up for the industry-wide GameStop self-exclusion program soared 25% during the period of coronavirus restrictions and lockdowns to nearly 218,000. And it is part of the obligations of each operator to remove such persons from all marketing campaigns.

The purpose of this is to protect people who are vulnerable to gambling and aim to prevent diving deeper into their gambling addiction or developing it, in case they notice that they are at risk in terms of that. Therefore, it is of extreme importance for gambling operators to respect their decision and stop targeting them in their marketing campaigns.

This is not the only measure taken to protect problem gamblers in the UK. In fact, in recent times, the UK government has implemented many similar laws, and gambling operators that don’t respect those laws are fined immediately.