A terrifying parable of the addictive power of internet gambling: It began with a £5 online bet. Then this ex-Major gambled away £750,000 - and his family
- Justyn Larcombe, 44 started gambling in September 2009 and is now in £100,000 debt
- Began working from home to devote his time to his online addiction
- Neglected his son while he checked his bets and sold baby's christening spoon to pay off debt
- At the height of his addiction, was spending seven hours a day on gambling websites
- Was forced to move back in with 70-year-old mother after losing his home
Four years ago, Justyn Larcombe’s life was little short of perfect. He and his wife, Emma, owned a £450,000 townhouse in the genteel Derbyshire village of Ashbourne, where they lived with their baby son, Matthew.
After a distinguished career in the Army — he served as a patrol commander in Northern Ireland and a Major during the Kosovo crisis — Justyn had moved into finance, earning a six-figure salary at a boutique insurance broking firm in the City of London.
He drove a £30,000 Porsche while Emma had a black Mercedes. They holidayed in luxury villas in Italy and Spain, and frequently dined out with friends. ‘It was a happy, family life full of friends and laughter,’ says Justyn.
Comfortable lifestyle: Justyn Larcombe was working for a London insurance firm and earning a six-figure salary when he started gambling.He took his family on luxury holidays and drove a £30,000 Porsche
Since then, things have unravelled spectacularly. Today, Justyn, 44, lives alone in a rented cottage in Shipbourne, Kent.
Emma, 39, remains 200 miles away in Ashbourne having moved in with her parents last year, taking Matthew, now five, and his younger brother Oscar, three, with her.
The Porsche is long gone, sold — along with most of Justyn’s possessions — to service debts of almost £100,000.
The reason? A crippling addiction to online gambling which cost Justyn both his job and his family, and saw him squander £750,000.
His is a salutary tale about the alarming way the online gambling industry — worth a staggering £2 billion in the UK — can wreck the lives of those from whom it profits.
The latest figures, recorded in 2010, put the number of gambling addicts in the UK at 450,000 — up from 300,000 in 2007.
According to GamCare, a gambling addiction charity, problems with online gambling were the cause of 34 per cent of calls to its helpline last year — second only to betting shops.
In Justyn’s case, the descent into addiction began with something as simple as a casual £5 bet on a rugby match, made one Saturday afternoon in September 2009.
‘I can’t even remember who was playing,’ he recalls. ‘I’d spotted an advert for Betfair and thought I’d look at its website. Perhaps I was bored and wanted a thrill.’
Betfair is a gambling website which allows users to place bets on sports events and play simulated versions of traditional casino games such as roulette and blackjack.
Justyn put £5 on the winning team, at evens, and doubled his money.
‘I’d never gambled before and I thought: “This is quite easy — I could make a bit of pocket money.” ’
It sounds harmless enough: a sports fan placing a modest bet on a winning team. Nearly three-quarters of adults gamble at least once a year.
Nine million do so online — and, in contrast with traditional betting-shop gambling, online gamblers tend to be educated, middle-class professionals like Justyn who can access the sites from their office computers and use pseudonyms to avoid the stigma of the High Street bookies.
But for Justyn, that £5 was just the beginning. A series of lucky wins prompted him gradually to raise the stakes, and before long he was betting hundreds at a time.
But when his wins were followed by a series of losses, Justyn raised the stakes dramatically.
‘I hate losing anything. So when I did lose, I would double the next bet to make up the losses.’
It wasn’t long before things were spiralling out of control. Within a year, Justyn was betting thousands every weekend, driven by the urge to recreate the thrill of his early wins.
Obsessive: At the height of his addiction, Justyn sold his son's Christening spoons to pay his debts. Matthew, 5 (right) and Oscar, 3 (left) now live 200 miles away from their father
‘To get that rush, I had to feel I was betting money that mattered.’
Though he sometimes won big — once netting £10,000 from a football bet — he frequently lost spectacularly.
He lost £17,000 on a single tennis match, after backing the Belarusian tennis player Victoria Azarenka, then World No.1, against an unknown.
He stood to make just a few hundred pounds — but Azarenka was injured in the first set and forfeited the match by retiring.
On another occasion he bet £5,000 that his football team, Tottenham Hotspur, would draw against Arsenal. Arsenal scored in the second half and won the match.
And at Cheltenham, he put £3,000 on one of the favourites to win the Gold Cup. The horse fell mid-way through the race.
He found excuses to spend more and more time online. He starting working from home, telling his company the six-hour round trip to his office in London was too time-consuming.
When he should have been on the phone to clients, he was betting on sport or playing roulette.
‘I’d go into my study at 8am and tell Emma I was working and didn’t want any interruptions until 4pm,’ he says.
She had no reason to suspect anything. When the couple’s second son, Oscar, was born in May 2010, she gave up her job managing her family’s hotel to look after the boys, cashing in her stake in the hotel for £70,000, which she gave to Justyn for safekeeping.
That summer, Justyn and Emma sold their home, intending to find somewhere bigger. They rented a cottage while they house-hunted.
Unbeknown to Emma, Justyn began to work his way through the £100,000 they had set aside for a deposit.
‘Every time we looked at a house, I’d come up with an excuse why I didn’t like it — too near to a main road, or the staircases were too steep.’
By the following spring, the deposit had gone — gambled away — along with Emma’s £70,000.
Like so many addicts before him, Justyn was convinced he could win it all back.
‘I couldn’t admit what I’d done,’ he says. ‘I thought Emma wouldn’t love me any more. The only way to make up for it was to win back her money.’
Temptation: Mr Larcombe was drawn to online gambling after he saw an advert and thought it would be a good way to make some pocket money
Hidden: Like many successful professionals, Mr Larcombe did all his gambling online and hid his habit from his family. When he and his wife Emma were looking for a new house and his debts were mounting up, he lied to get out of the purchase
He borrowed from banks and payday loan lenders, amassing debts of more than £70,000, and secretly hawked the couple’s belongings, including the children’s christening silver for £100 to an antiques shop.
‘Emma trusted me entirely with our finances — and I just lied through my teeth to her,’ he says.
Of course, the façade sometimes slipped. Once, Emma discovered Justyn asleep at his computer in front of a betting website. He laughed it off as a one-off.
On another occasion, the family were watching TV and a roulette wheel came on the screen.
‘Look — it’s Daddy’s work,’ said Matthew, who’d seen his father gambling in his office. Justyn quickly changed the channel.
There was no disguising the family’s tightening budget — foreign holidays became a thing of a past, and the Porsche was sold for £18,000.
But Justyn told his wife this was simply because their savings were tied up in investments, and said the missing silver was ‘being repaired’.
Inevitably, his addiction took its toll on more than just his bank balance. He found himself becoming increasingly neglectful of his sons.
Matthew suffers from hemiplegia, a condition limiting his movement on the right-hand side, as well as autism and epilepsy. He needs to be closely monitored — yet, in the grip of his obsession, Justyn left him alone in the car for more than two hours.
‘We were going to the swings one Sunday,’ he recalls. ‘After putting him in the car, I went back to get his coat from the house. I thought: “I’ll just check that one of my bets has come in.”
‘It hadn’t, so I started playing roulette to make up what I’d lost.
‘Two hours later, Matthew was fast asleep, his face streaked with tears. He’d cried himself to sleep.’
Looking back, Justyn is tortured by guilt, saying: ‘Those are the things you regret most — those moments you’ll never get back.’
At the height of his addiction, he devoted no more than ‘half an hour a week’ to his job.
Then, last summer, Justyn, who had begun using his company credit card to fund his gambling, was confronted by the chief executive and resigned.
Not long after, Emma stumbled upon the truth after seeing one of Justyn’s bank statements in his office.
‘I was in the garden with the boys — she just came out and said: “I know everything.” ’
Unlucky: A bet on tennis player Victoria Azarenka at Wimbledon cost Mr Larcombe £17,000 when she fell and injured herself during the match and was forced to retire
Out of control: Mr Larcombe was betting thousands of pounds a week at the height of his desperation. He spent the money set aside for a deposit on a house on horses at Cheltenham and online roulette
It was the moment Justyn had been dreading. ‘I knew it was coming, and had not been able to sleep. But I was powerless to stop it.
‘Emma couldn’t look at me or talk to me. She was in total shock. I knew it was probably the end of my marriage, but I wanted to do everything I could to try to save it.’
They spent the day phoning up debt counsellors, totting up Justyn’s losses, and working out how to cope with their budgetary black hole with the help of one of Emma’s friends, who works in financial services.
It was too little too late. Emma left soon afterwards, taking the boys and moving in with her parents. She has since filed for divorce.
Unemployed, virtually penniless, and parted from his beloved family, Justyn’s life was in tatters. Yet still he gambled, even selling Emma’s abandoned £6,500 diamond engagement ring for just £2,000.
‘I hated myself,’ he says. ‘Most people will say: “Why didn’t he stop?” But that’s the thing about a compulsion: you lose all sense of rationality.’
When it came, intervention assumed an unlikely form. Two months after Emma had left, Justyn’s 70-year-old mother, Jennifer, arrived at his front door.
Warned by Emma that Justyn was facing eviction, she had driven from her home in Maidstone, Kent, to give him an ultimatum.
‘She said: “You can either come home, or you can stay here alone and end up homeless.”
‘At that moment, I realised: I had become a slave to my addiction. It was the most humiliating moment of my life.’
So, 26 years after leaving home to join the Army, Justyn moved back in with his mum. He had nothing but a black bin liner of clothes and debts of £70,000 to his name.
Since then, he has been attending Gamblers Anonymous meetings, and is beginning to recover. He has installed software on his computer to block access to gambling websites, and says he isn’t tempted to gamble.
Insurmountable: After spending £750,000, Mr Larcombe moved back in with his 70-year-old mother with nothing but a black bin bag of clothes
He has rediscovered the Christianity of his childhood and is writing a book about his experience, to be published next year, which he hopes will act as a warning to others of the dangers of online gambling.
But he will never recover from the loss of his family.
‘I will live with the memory of how I treated them for rest of my life. It haunts me . . . nearly every night I cry thinking about it,’ he says.
He remains angry — with himself most of all, but also with what he describes as the ‘evil, avaricious online gaming companies who prey upon those on their uppers at a time when, financially and socially, they are at their most vulnerable’.
‘You can’t turn on the TV for something being sponsored by a gambling website. At its very worst it can lead to death and suicide and broken families.’
He’s not alone in his anger. Experts are increasingly calling for a crackdown on a gambling industry that has thrived since the Labour government passed the 2005 Gambling Act.
This allowed operators to sponsor sporting events and advertise on TV and radio for the first time.
Who knows? Perhaps if Justyn had never seen that original advert offering odds on a rugby match, his marriage would still be intact?
It’s also doubtful he would have developed such an addiction if gambling hadn’t been accessible online — the Gambling Act also legalised online casinos for the first time.
‘For those who are vulnerable to addiction, the internet facilitates and enhances those problems,’ says Dr Mark Griffiths, Professor of Gambling Studies at Nottingham Trent University. ‘It’s highly accessible and highly convenient.’
Justyn says he accepts ‘full responsibility’ for his behaviour, but he also wants to see an industry-wide levy introduced to fund addiction treatment and more prominent warnings on gambling websites.
‘We need something more than a sign saying “please gamble responsibly”,’ he says.
In the meantime, perhaps his riches-to-rags tale is warning enough.
As he puts it: ‘I had a beautiful wife who I loved, wonderful children, a house, cars. And I was left with nothing but a black bin bag.’
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2395877/A-terrifying-parable-addictive-power-internet-gambling-It-began-5-online-bet-Then-ex-Major-gambled-away-750-000--family.html#ixzz2cDxIwJlG
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