Jackie Olden can pinpoint the troubling origin of her mum’s gambling addiction. “She was the kind of person who’d go to one shop where milk was a penny cheaper and another where bread was cheaper,” Olden recalls.
“This [gambling] would never have entered her head.”
But in 2008, her mother, Wendy Hughes, 64, took a job at the bookmaker Coral to make ends meet. At the time, digital roulette machines – known as fixed-odds betting terminals (FOBTs) – were a new feature of betting shops, one that was proving extremely lucrative.
Staff were encouraged to play the machines themselves every day, on a free demonstration setting, to stoke punters’ curiosity and drum up more business.
An email from Hughes’s manager at Coral, seen…
