A woman in Australia has brought a lawsuit against Flutter Entertainment’s Sportsbet, The Age, a local media outlet, originally reported.
The lawsuit alleges that the woman’s account had misappropriated her life savings and allowed him to burn through an estimated AUD 820,000 or roughly $542,106, with Sportsbet not intervening to ensure the source of the funding.
Rather than intervening and checking where the money was coming from, the complaint alleges that Sportsbet carried on with the man’s unauthorized gambling of Kym Cavigan’s funds.
In her lawsuit, Cavigan argues that Sportsbet should never have allowed Andrew Marshall, the accused, to redirect her money and deposit it into a betting account to begin with.
“It’s not their money, and they should have known that the money they are profiting from was stolen from us,” Kavigan said. Marshall supposedly misappropriated a total of AUD 4.2 million from various clients.
Victim and Accountant Work Together to Piece Together the Timeline
Yet, Marshall was remorseful about his actions – confessing to the victim that he had misappropriated the funds and clearly struggling with his ability to control his gambling spending.
For his part, Marshall has offered full cooperation in the matter, assisting the plaintiff by providing bank statements and assisting her case in figuring out the exact timeline that led to the money being forfeited to the casino.
Australia has one of the world’s highest incidences of problem gambling, and accountants have misappropriated client funds to fund their gambling activities in the past. In one instance, a Melbourne accountant was found guilty of misappropriating more than $2 million of customers’ money.