If someone else's gambling is hurting you
A partner, a parent, an adult child, a housemate, a friend who keeps borrowing. When the 2024 ACT survey found that 15.8% of adults had experienced gambling harm, it counted harm caused by someone else's gambling in that figure. Plenty of the people in it have never staked a dollar.
Both services take calls from family and friends in their own right. You do not need the other person's permission, you do not need their name, and you do not have to talk them into counselling first.
What tibbi will not do for you, so you do not waste days finding out
This is a tool the other person uses on their own account. It gives you no window into it, and that is deliberate rather than an unfinished feature.
- You cannot see their account. Not their losses, not their lessons, not their cooldown, not whether they still open the app.
- We will not confirm whether they have an account at all. Confirming it would itself be a disclosure about a person's gambling, to someone they did not authorise.
- There is no monitoring, no alert and no weekly report that could be set up for a concerned relative. The feature does not exist and is not planned.
- You cannot lift, shorten or extend their cooldown, and neither can we. Nobody can.
- You cannot send them anything through us — no nudge, no message, no invitation attributed to you.
If that reads as unhelpful, consider the same rule from the other side: the day a service lets a family member watch an account is the day people stop being honest inside it, and stop using it at all. The people who most need a safe place to see the maths are exactly the ones who would be driven off.
What you can do, starting today
Get your own support, in your own name
Counsellors on 1800 858 858 work with affected family members as clients, not as messengers. That means talking about your position, your money and your limits, rather than strategies for changing them.
Most first calls are one sentence long — "someone in my house is gambling and I do not know what to do". That is enough to start with.
Protect the money that is yours
A free, independent financial counsellor can talk you through joint accounts, redraw facilities, guarantees you have signed and debts in your name. The National Debt Helpline is 1800 007 007, free and confidential, weekdays.
Do it before a crisis, not during one. Separating your own money is rarely fast, and it is much harder to arrange in the week everything falls over.
Write things down
Dates, amounts, what was said, what was promised. Not to build a case against anyone, but because gambling harm runs on a fog of small revisions, and after six months you will genuinely not be sure what happened when.
Keep it somewhere they cannot read it. This is for you and for anyone professional you eventually talk to.
If there are children, or you are afraid
Financial pressure and gambling harm sit alongside family violence often enough that it is worth naming. If you are frightened of the person, or of what happens when you say no, ring 1800RESPECT on 1800 737 732, any time.
If someone is in immediate danger, ring 000. Nothing on this page comes before that.
The two things that feel right and usually are not
Paying the debt off. It is the most natural response in the world and it very often makes the next loss bigger, because it removes the only consequence that had arrived so far. If you are going to help financially, a counsellor can help you do it in a way that does not simply reset the clock — and you are allowed to decide not to.
Policing them. Checking phones, holding the cards, ringing to confirm where they are. It turns you into the enforcement arm of the problem, it exhausts you, and it does not work: the behaviour moves rather than stops. Set limits about what you will do instead of rules about what they must do.
Neither of these is a criticism of anyone who has done both. Nearly everyone does.
What tibbi can give you: the mechanics, from the inside
You can create your own account, on your own terms, and it has nothing to do with theirs. Not to spy, and not to learn how to argue better — but because "why can't they just stop" gets a lot less baffling once you have watched the machinery work on you.
The maths they are never shown
Every simulated bet displays the odds, the implied probability, a market-normalised estimate after removing the displayed margin, and the house edge. The estimate is not the true underlying chance or a forecast. On a typical pair of prices the two implied probabilities add to 104.8% rather than 100%, the house edge is 4.5%, and 100 tokens staked returns 95.45 on average. That gap is the entire business model, and it is the thing nobody sees on a real betting screen.
Why the near miss keeps them there
Short lessons on near misses, chasing losses, and variable rewards — the specific design features that make stopping hard. This is the part that tends to change how a family member talks about it, from "weak" to "engineered".
What losing actually costs
In the simulation, losses come out of a life: the Car, the House, the Job, then Friends. Family, once it is gone, does not come back — there is no restore button anywhere in the product, including for staff. That rule exists because in the real version there is no restore button either.
Your account is yours. Nothing you do in it is visible to anyone else, and it is not linked to any other person's account by name, household or anything else.
If they ask you for money
You are allowed to say no, and you are allowed to say no without a reason. If you want to help, pay a bill directly rather than handing over cash, and expect the request to come again — that is the pattern rather than a personal failure on their part or yours. A financial counsellor on 1800 007 007 will help you work out what you can actually afford to lose before you decide, not after.
If they want to stop but cannot
Self-exclusion is the strongest tool available: a person registers themselves to be blocked from betting platforms for a period they choose. In the 2024 ACT survey only 33.2% of people betting online had heard of it. We do not link out to any gambling-related site, including registration pages, but a counsellor on 1800 858 858 will walk them through it — and will talk to you about how to raise it without it landing as an ultimatum.
You are allowed to be the one who needs help. The harm the survey counted was not only lost money: it was sleep, work, health and the constant management of someone else's crisis. None of that requires the other person to agree that there is a problem before you are entitled to support.
Where to next
tibbi is not a counselling service and does not handle a crisis. If this is happening right now, ring 13 11 14.