wanna see a magic trick?
But seriously what kind of predatory policy is that in the first place?
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View original on sh.itjust.worksBut seriously what kind of predatory policy is that in the first place?
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I remember a few people complaining about being permanently banned from online games for lying in the in-game chat about being very young.
This is super clever. I cannot believe this never occurred to me, and I discovered it in a Lemmy 'shitpost' no less.
Let's keep up the memes and shitposts in this category!
fucking hell they are really playing on people's gambling addiction aren't they
That's what casinos are!!
Super illegal in 95% of jurisdictions
they should 100% be put in jail for this
Best thing I heard all day is this 😁
If you're an addict, gambling will prey on you.
Also, OnlyFans will prey on you. Doordash will prey on you. Clash of Clans will prey on you. The stock market will prey on you. Your church will prey on you.
You have two choices. Control yourself (only you can do it) or be a sucker
How does onlyfans prey on you exactly? Perhaps for some people it does but I feel the porn addiction thing is pretty overblown. I don't doubt some have it but the internet will have you think everyone who watches porn is an addict.
its called "laxed regulation for dubious reasons". happens all the time because government officials should probably wear F1 gear with all their sponsor logos slapped on them.
What country is "you can't close your account unless you go 90 days without using it first" legal in?
The USA. Facebook also does this.
This looks like a gambling app. So it's not that you can't close it until it's not used. Voluntary exclusion is a mandatory policy required by legislation so a gambling addict can ask a casino to functionally ban them. This app is extra predatory in that they don't allow a permanent ban right away. Their goal is to make it take multiple requests so an addict can relapse and spend more money and it's the addicts fault.
So the 24 hour and 90 day periods are different? Maybe it's because of the LLM but they're presented as the same thing.
Ya, they're sequential. So if you have a devastating loss you can't just immediately delete your account, you need to cool down for 24hr before they'll even let you request a full 90 day self exclusion. And finally only after that can you actually delete your account.
I can think of a lot of services.
“We’ll deactivate your account but not fully close it. If you want to cancel closure log back in within 30 days.”
The kind that wants market driven solutions.
A shithole country.
At least for us that are clever, can use tactics like this while we can.
Ayyy another newbie! Hi it's my first day here
How can you tell that my account is new?
Also its a new account, I was here a few years ago.
Voyager has an emoji next to new accounts with the age of the account.
Yup, this
Summit too
I wonder how permanent closure is different from permanent lockout, but maybe it is similar enough in this case (I expect, they keep your data in the latter case)
They would dump your data asap. They want no record that they illegally let a minor use their site.
they'd keep it just to show that once they found out the account was a minor's, they closed the account immediately. it's proof of compliance.
But they certainly wouldn't share that 12yo's information with other companies to prove how good a company they are in shutting down a 12yo's account, giving other companies all the information from the 12yo's account to help the other companies better shut down future 12yo's accounts.
"We're not sharing a 12 year old's information. We're passing on information on how to prevent us from sharing a 12 year old's information in the future!"
Maybe they just start emailing you again in six years
I started dipping into watching regular cable again since we have it at the moment bundled with our internet, and man the commercials are bleak now. It’s all weight loss medication, depression medication, and gambling apps.
Weight loss meds are a miracle
Sorry, I can't read your comment because ozempic blinded me
Have you tried Ozempic? Have you? Huh? You fat piece of shit!? Ozempic! Try it! Here's a coupon for 50% off Ozempic. Have you tried it yet?
Also, hurt in a crash? Call us! We'll get you MILLIONS because you swerved to avoid that child in the street and hit a traffic light! We'll sue that child's family FOR YOU!
Why?
Because by the nature of how human fats work - there is hardly a safe way to get rid of them without working out. This is why every weight loss drug has had serious side effects.
GLP-1 is like the first one that's supposedly safe for general public (hence the miracle), but we are already seeing lawsuits and what not from bad side effects, so might not be too big of a miracle after all.
This is without even getting into the cardiovascular system and how this enables lazy lifestyle (instead of working out) that inevitably leads to early death for many
Nothing is free, the difference between medicine and poison is dose.
I would bet my life that there are unknown unfortunate side effects that a lot of people won't like; time will reveal. There's a race to sell all that they can now before those side effects are widely known
I was interested in GLP-1 at one point, but after seeing the possible side effect of "hair loss", I decided my hair was preferable to 20 lb. weight loss.
GLP drugs just reduce appatite, right?
This.
Fentanyl will fucking kill you with micro-grams of a dose spliced into that line you're about to snort.
It'll also help your brain feel happy after you suffered a traumatic injury and you're laying in a hospital.
I honestly don't even know how they work as they really aren't common in Europe. That being said, US is positioned in quite a terrible place when it comes to nutritionism, so on average for every pound American eats, they get like 70% percent of the nutrients and vitamins as opposed to someone from UK for example. This means that if Americans start eating less simply because of GLP, malnutrition is going to spike. For many the daily food is so bad that for you to not be deficient, you will be obese.
Looking online, the stats look worse than I remembered, so I'm not sure how accurate it is.
The average U.K. adult is not the threshold for preventing malnutrition.
The programming is pretty fucking bleak, too. My elderly parents have cable TV and I try to watch it sometimes to entertain myself while I'm taking care of them, and I can't find a fucking thing worth watching despite them having 500 channels or so. I always end up watching Beat Bobby Flay on the Food Channel and I can't stand that fucking show.
Streaming plateforms are so bad that traditional TV doesn't seems that catastrophic anymore.
The high seas are peaceful and serene. Yar.
It's the wild West meets end stage capitalism out there.
It's a gambling site.
Gambling is inherently predatory. It's addictive. Gambling sites prey on this addiction. They're not gonna let you go so easily. The wait period is to see if you're really one of their best customers, unable to go cold-turkey.
But it's so obviously flagrantly predatory... I really thought this would be too far, like legally.
I remember a time when Gambling was poison to professional sports. I'm not talking about office fantasy teams, or small bets between friends. I'm talking capital G Gambling. Professional Gambling run by businesses and gaming commissions. Professional sports tried very hard to distance themselves from gambling, so much so that Vegas didn't have professional sports teams. Now there's a ribbon on the screen showing Gambling stats the whole game. It's ridiculous.
Now I know we can't put the genie back into the bottle. Gambling apps are here and they're not going anywhere. We can stop the ubiquitous ads. We've done this before with cigarettes. It wouldn't be hard. Take down the ads, stop showing betting lines during the game, remove any mention of it. Cause right now it really looks like professional sports and gambling are joined at the hip and before too long American professional sports will be more about gambling than the game. Which lets face it, professional sports are about being a profitable business first and a sports team second. We've just completely forgotten about the game to make another quick buck.
i thought that already happened in the NBA and NFL. MLB, maybe. Pete Rose and Michael Jordan come to mind.
Yeah, not to be pithy but the first step is admitting there's a problem. That's where we're at now (or trying to get to).
It's so weird to me that sports/gambling have become so conflated. Clearly a lot of money has been thrown at the businesses running professional sports to land us here.
Cigarettes is a perfect analogy. It's not even an extreme comparison, both are undeniably a net harm to people, but are somehow normalized.
Have you seen who's making the laws?
Fuck is a cooldown period?
To let their addiction drag them back in.
That's the perfect reply.
Bingo
Bango bongo bish bash bosh
Bingo bango bongo, I don't want to leave the Congo
My nephew fell for this trick. He's not a child, but he was gambling online on a European site as an American. He won big, tried to withdraw, they asked for a European passport. RIP his entire account.
Yup, this has been going on since the very early days of online casinos. A buddy of mine get screwed out of a few thousand playing one of those Caribbean poker sites because the Caribbean "bank" which handles the deposits didn't participate in the US banking system, and he'd checked a box which certified that he was a citizen of St Lucia or something. Whoops.
For any finincial anything always do a round trip with a $10 too see if it's possible.
He was putting in thousands, about $5,000 USD. They were letting him withdraw a few hundred here and there. Then he won something like $10k that's when they did a Know Your Customer check. Which he failed, obviously. They kept his principal and his winnings, lol.
Hopefully he took it as a lesson. Not much else he can do. They said on their terms of service Americans were explicitly forbidden. Not much recourse.
That's not a trick, that's a legal requirement. They have to do KYC on a few grand and AML once it gets bigger. I had to go through this with Wise when I received a life insurance payout from another continent and I had to phone customer support to get it cleared.
I'm not saying it was illegal or anything, just that they probably make a lot of money turning on the KYC after big wins. They'll never do one to a losing customer.
In that sense, I do believe it's a bit tricky.
I've heard of scammers paying out small amounts deliberately to reel in more money so this still doesn't guarantee it's real.
So the trick is to find a bunch of scammers to try this on
Even legitimate gambling websites do this, I was able to cash out £150 fine but a few weeks later when I tried to cash out at £700 I had to supply id. I was still able to deposit more money from the same card though, supplied my id, cashed it all out, told them to delete all of my details and account and never looked back
Legal requirements, KYC doesn't kick in from 0, but it does after a few hundred or thousand
But surely it would stop me from giving them money aswell as taking it? If it was actually a safeguard
same thing.
Man. I gotta say. Keeping my kids in a DMZ through their childhood while pretending this didn't see what they were doing paid off handsomely.
Having worked in the industry, there's actually an explanation that is only half predatory.
Most of those addicted to gambling can't and won't shake it. They refuse to seek professional help, and the decision to quit only lasts the "temporary embarrassment" phase of losing all their money. Meaning: most gamblers who decide to quit (and we've got statistics on this), about 80-85% on average, is back to their favourite gambling service within 60 days.
At the company I worked at, the primary reasoning for having a cooldown period instead of instant deletion was the following:
Basically the idea is "if they're coming back anyway, we might as well make it easy for them".
Now the thing is, for all the regulations... Gambling services are unfortunately not responsible for the addiction they cause. In my opinion they should be, just as a doctor would be held responsible if they fed into a patient's painkiller addiction. And for all the regulatory crap... most people in gambling companies aren't interested in compliance that much. It's very much a "do it then say sorry and fix it in post" attitude from the leadership and higher management. So while the above might be the "official" explanation, I have zero doubt that the decision makers don't give a fuck and are specifically doing it to psychologically pressure people into coming back.
"Basically the idea is "if they're coming back anyway, we might as well make it easy for them"."
Thats extremely predatory, you are leaving bait in a trap.
The responsible thing would be to delete and ban them since they have an addiction.
What exactly is the non-predatory half of that?
Had to account hop as fedia.io is down...
The intent isn't necessarily predatory. To explain it from business/product side, it boils down to two options:
Remember, that level of any corporation operates on a KPI based approach. They don't see people, they don't see individuals, they see profit per user, they see user retention after a long term break, they see user losses to competitors because "their company has features X Y and Z, while ours don't".
That's why regulations are a joke. These very same people will go on about how preventing gambling addiction and general negative effects of gambling is good, then do the polar opposite. This is a big part of the reason why I left. Zero accountability of the people who make the decision while us peons were forced to do biannual compliance training and other BS, even though we never interacted with customers...
Proceeds to describe an extremely predatory business practice and the corrupt incentives that motivate it.
That sounds pretty fucking predatory.
Yup, that's evil. That's sick thinking that doesn't respect your customers' agency. Kind of unsurprising when your business is predating upon gamblers, but still evil.
Eh, no, customer retention isn't inherently evil. After all that's the goal of every company, to essentially "outbid" competitors for as many customers as possible.
They're not customers, they're users. And I didn't mean to intimate that the competitors weren't also evil in this racket.
Not OP but my thoughts are that maybe if they get back with their stats they won't grind all the way back to their original stats potentially worsening the addiction?
There have been various stories in the Irish & UK press of people bombarded with enticements by the likes of Paddy Power to gamble even when they were obvious problem gamblers. This all comes out in court when the person ends up stealing from their employers but clearly for every prominent case there must be dozens, hundreds of less prominent ones.
These companies obey the law but the law isn't strong enough so there is plenty of scope for them to abuse it, encouraging gambling addiction and not shutting down problem gamblers. There are plenty of ways it could be regulated effectively but governments don't have the stomach to do it. e.g. maintaining & enforcing an industry list of problem gamblers, putting limits on the amount anybody can bet, banning comps & perks, banning advertising & sponsorship, and heavy fines for failure to comply.
There is actually a country level list of problem gamblers that the companies HAVE to ban. Problem is, these gamblers will find ways around the law to satisfy their addiction.
I do agree with the rest, regulation really needs to pick up. unfortunately most governments like the money they can make on gambling too much...
Just listen to Labour MPs talk about gambling companies. Politicians are really cheap to buy.
That sadly sums it up pretty well.
Yeah! Like all those doctors who got in trouble for the opioid crisis!
Bro, many doctors are terrified of catching the DEAs attention to the point where people who actually need them have trouble getting all controls, not just opioids.
A bunch of doctors running pill mills did get busted for it.
Yeah, continuing an Adderall prescription is a pain in the ass thesedays, which really sucks when you need it to function.
Tbh the DEA should always have been subservient to the FDA
Thank you for saying it. I wanted to, but my brain isn't working well, 'cause my untreated chronic pain is taking up all my brain power. Exactly because of what you mentioned. Even though I always did everything right and never would dream of abusing them. Life is hell now 🙃
Oooh, I saw a part of that firsthand.
Relatives in Maine, three at the same address, got hooked up with a pill-mill in Biddeford.
One sold all his Oxycontins each month, made a grand off of it.
How he passed his mandatory "pill count" every week was to get the balance of pills he needed from his other relatives. They all had the same prescription. Would go in, be one pill over or under ("I felt good last week and forgot.." or "yaah, it was rotten for the pain so I popped an extra..") and skirted the system for a couple of years.
Coasted along fine UNTIL the Feds went and busted a Walgreen's Pharmacy Warehouse in Florida that was the source of the pills...
The next day, 4 of the 7 MD's at the pill mill disappeared into the ether. A few months later the grapevine relays that two lost their licenses one got some sort of penalty and one likely left the country never to be seen again.
Fucking crazy times.
No fines? Prison?
Sounds like one of them ran from the country. Since you don't usually do that without extreme circumstances, I assume a longer stay in the tax-paid hotel was at least on the table
Loosing your whole license to practice is IMO almost as bad. What you gonna do? Get a new equal paying job? In a medical field? Lol yeah.
Why is an MD suddenly applyijg for a pharmacy assistant job. Amd a pharma company probably wouldnt touch the applicant witg a 10m pole
I've worked in gambling (they like to call themselves "gaming") as well and this isn't true. Before you can enter any market the local regulator has to approve you. Also for any changes you make after you are in. Exception are markets with lax regulators, which is often the case for online casinos.
Just because your company was slightly better than the rest it doesn't mean all are equal...
And just because the regulator approved your entry to the market it doesn't mean you're always compliant.
While working on the mobile apps of my now ex-employer, I found multiple compliance bugs. The ones that were direct, obvious violations were fixed immediately, the others that were questionably breaking compliance? Those went straight for our backlog of issues that never got fixed in my ~2.5 year tenure.
And beyond that, most people from product side cared about how they can skirt regulations, how far they can go against the spirit of the law while keeping to the word of it. I pushed back on multiple features that were obviously predatory and enabling problem gamblers, going against our "responsible gambling" policies, and the response was that I should shut up and not stand in the way of profits.
I mean gambling is shitty but we don’t hold folks that make alcohol responsible for folks getting addicted to alcohol.
I’m not familiar with legal gambling, but theoretically there is a percentage of users that partake casually for fun - yes? And others who get addicted. Same with booze.
Obviously the overall experience of gambling is more predatory/distasteful, but I’m not sure that means they should be legally responsible for the folks who get addicted. If the booze makers and sellers are not responsible for providing a potentially addictive product, why are they?
We made tobacco companies legally responsible to an extent. I don't see why we can't do the same to alcohol and gambling by making them do something like fund rehab programs.
True, but we do hold those who serve alcohol responsible for over-serving customers (at least in the US). Though I'm not sure how we'd even begin to regulate gambling services in a similar manner. A bartender can be held legally responsible if they serve alcohol to someone who is very visibly intoxicated, then that person drives home and kills a family of 4.
Booze makers aren’t using predictive algorithms to hook people that are trying to quit.
They for sure create targeted advertising towards likely repeat-spend customers. Big box liquor stores I’m sure use algorithms to encourage repeat purchases.
Again - not defending predatory gambling sites at all - just aware that almost every business model is about targeting big spenders and getting them to spend more. Example: micro transactions in gaming.
“Everyone does it” doesn’t make it ok, but if we don’t like that gambling sites care more about profit than the wellbeing of users? Certainly they are not alone in that.
Ok, but if we take a step back, is there any justification for this kind of gambling remaining legal, outside of a capitalist view?
Is there any justification in folks selling crap unhealthy junk food? It has any number of ingredients that are harmful to humans short and long term. It is addicting and habit forming. The health consequences on a macro level hurt society.
There are any number of sometimes pleasurable but undeniably harmful things sold for a profit. I’m not saying I think gambling should be legal, but I am pointing out that it’s a slippery slope re: what crosses the line?
I don’t spend money on gambling but I do sometimes spend money on other things I know are bad for me. Is the answer to outlaw unhealthy things?
It’s not just the capitalists that want to make money - there are people who WANT to gamble. Make it illegal it will still happen - just without regulation. Prohibition didn’t work.
Plenty of food additives are illegal, so we've already decided that to some extent regulation there is OK.
Going down that slippery slope, why are recreational drugs illegal? We've drawn plenty of lines already, and I've never heard anyone defend gambling with an argument that isn't "but my liberty" or "it's going to happen whether it's legal or not".
For the record, I believe in the legalisation of drugs that do not have: A) Massive addiction-causing traits and B) Enormous health detriments
As we've already done, the answer is to find the limit for what is acceptable and regulate based on that limit. The limit changes with time and society (see: pornography, cannabis), but I believe gambling as a corporate profit option should be outlawed.
If gambling must exist, allow non-profit gambling operators and ban the rest.
They are, but in a more traditional sense.
The hell they aren't. That's called "Marketing". You're describing "Marketing".
Maybe they all should be.
A gambling service has a predatory policy to make breaking an addiction as hard as possible. Yep that sounds about right
This predatory nature is going into my thesis on how gacha gaming led to the downfall of online porn
go on...
Can you give us a tease?
Spend $5 now to get 10 spins on the lucky wheel, and you just might win a tease!
I'm uncovering my calves... Ooo hot, right?
Hilarious way to terminate an account very quick.
Also shows that using automation for accounts administration.
It is identified as a bot
Edit: oh, administration
This feels more like a LifeProTip than a shitpost
you acknowledged the x-post potential
ball is in your court now
Jesus - that comms so dead I didn’t think it actually existed…
be the change
I can’t. My battery’s dead.
I'm confused by 24 hour self exclusion, followed by 90 day self exclusion. So 91 day self exclusion? Why not just say that?
What even is "self-exclusion". Are you supposed to not log in for 91 days? Not sure what they're saying here.
By the sound of it, it's them saying if you want your account permanently closed, you have to voluntarily not use it for 91 days, basically giving you a chance to let addiction suck you back in, and thereby preventing people from immediately closing their accounts when they have a moment of clarity or big loss.
Otherwise a lot of people would immediately nuke their accounts when they have a really bad losing streak, and that would be real bad for business.
I believe that "self exclusion" is a feature where you tell the gambling company you don't want them to do business with you for the specified period. Then they won't do business with you during the period, even if you try to come back to them later.
In some jurisdictions this kind of voluntary blacklist can also be done at the gambling regulator, in which case it would apply to all gambling establishments in the jurisdiction.
no incentive to make it easier or less complicated I suppose
site now pairs an age of 12yo with the name and identity, that spreads out to data brokers, and the other 9384575 'partners' they have... and soon enough, facebook, xhitter, reddit, google, microsoft, sony, nintendo, steam.... all start demanding proof of id or no access.
how likely is this, in reality? I've put tons of false information on accounts, and they probably could figure out my real age if they wanted to.
Obviously this is possible, I'm just curious if this would actually trigger an age check on say, a Discord account.
I'm seeing nothing but upside to this plan...
We've already established this is more a LifeProTip.
xhitler already wants my photo ID scanned from the full app installed on my personal mobile device
I swear, this has to be my soul twin.
That's genius
😎
https://lemmy.world/post/52707263