LordBobbin wrote: ↑Fri Apr 28, 2023 11:08 am
BFDon wrote: ↑Fri Apr 28, 2023 7:24 am
What's awful about it exactly? You think the person (if it is even a person) checking your 'private financial arrangements' cares about you or what you are spending your money on beyond checking you can afford it based on your incomings/outgoings. Money in your bank account doesn't tell the full story, it could be a loan you need to pay back.
If running checks on me or getting me to send in some documents means 1 more problem gambler is saved then i'm more than willing to do that
Well if a bank was prepared to loan some money to somebody, particularly in this day and age - I'm aware things were far more lax pre-2008, for instance - then that ought to be enough. Of the people I've met, at least half are rather uncontrolled in their spending, but it's only if they're a gambler that they're told that their spending needs to be vetted. (You can pour as much money as you like into buying drinks or cigarettes, and nobody will insist on seeing your wage packet!)
And to combat the few who can get around bank lending rules, I have also conceded that a restriction on deposits (of, say, £50 or £100 a month) should be an option. Or, alternatively, if somebody can show that they started with, say, a deposit of a couple or hundred or so, and have turned that into a much larger sum, that should be enough. That person shouldn't have to show any evidence of pay-cheques, investments etc. just because they had a short run of bets against them. If somebody can keep building their bankroll, and keep increasing their stakes in line with that, at some point they're going to fall foul of these rules. Why should that person be told they've got to reduce their stakes to a tiny fraction just because they hit some magic number that the govt ministers pulled off the tops of their heads.
It's not just banks, it might be friends as well. Seems fairly typical for problem gamblers to borrow from people they know. If i send my last 3 month bank statements in and 3 months ago 1 friend paid 1k into my account, next month another friend paid in a few k, then a different person this month and it all gets deposited into betting accounts with no withdrawals then that's a cause for concern. I agree there's a big drinking problem in this country but it is bit different because you can only drink so fast, gambling you can repeat over and over and quickly get into a deep hole without anyone around you even knowing what's happening.
I haven't read the paper yet but from what i've read 'the expectation is that the majority [of checks] would involve credit reference agencies and would not interrupt the customer journey unless the check raises concerns". However, the white paper notes that "information may need to be collected directly from the customer" when frictionless checks fail to provide enough information.'
I presume if you've built up a big bank and incur some losses (and that money is still in your betting account or in a savings account) then you won't have a problem so long as your credit rating is ok
