Support centre
If gambling is causing trouble for you or for someone close to you, these are real services with real people answering. tibbi does not replace any of them.
You do not have to wait until things get bad. Most people ringing for the first time manage one sentence — "I'm not sure whether I have a problem" — and that is enough to start with.
The two urgent-help numbers stay visible at high-risk points in the app. The service directory below adds self-exclusion and financial support for people who need a practical next step rather than crisis support.
What each one helps with
Gambling Help Online
1800 858 858
Specifically for gambling. Counselling by phone and by web chat, 24 hours a day, free anywhere in Australia. They support people who are betting and also the people around them — partners, parents, housemates.
Ring when: you are hiding what you have lost, borrowing to keep betting, or you just want to say it out loud to someone who will not judge you.
Lifeline
13 11 14
A general crisis line, 24 hours a day. Not gambling specialists, but specialists in the moment when a person cannot carry it any more.
Ring when: you are thinking about hurting yourself, or you cannot see a way out. That comes before anything else on this page.
Self-exclusion
You register yourself to be blocked from betting platforms for a period you choose. In Australia the national register for online betting is called BetStop; venues run their own schemes on top of that.
In the 2024 ACT survey, only 33.2% of people who bet online had heard of BetStop. It is the strongest tool available, and most of the people who need it do not know it exists.
These links go to Australian Government support services, never to a bookmaker. BetStop covers licensed Australian online and phone wagering; the ACT scheme covers licensed gambling venues in the Territory. You can also ring 1800 858 858 and a counsellor can help you consider the right option.
Free financial counselling
A financial counsellor can help with gambling-related debt, overdue bills, joint accounts and conversations with creditors. The service is free, confidential and independent; you do not need to have everything organised before you call.
Call when: money pressure is making it hard to stop, you are borrowing to gamble, or someone else's gambling is affecting your household finances.
Call a financial counsellor · 1800 007 007The companion screen
tibbi does not run an AI conversation with you. The companion screen suggests you open an AI assistant of your own choosing if you want someone to talk at two in the morning, and it shows you the same two numbers as above.
A built-in version ships only when all of the following exist: a system prompt signed off by a clinical adviser, a layer that recognises signs of crisis, automatic hand-off to a helpline, and a clear statement that it is an AI, that it does not diagnose, and that it does not treat. Miss one and it does not ship, deadline or no deadline.
If the person with the problem is not you
The 2024 ACT survey counted harm caused by someone else's gambling in the 15.8% of adults who experienced harm. A good share of the people affected have never staked a dollar themselves.
Both lines above take calls from family and friends. You do not have to talk the other person into counselling before you are allowed to ring for yourself.
What tibbi can and cannot do
It can: show you the maths behind a bet before you get used to not looking at it; let you feel consequences build up somewhere that costs no real money; and give you a rehearsal of being locked out of betting for seven days.
It cannot: diagnose, treat, replace a counsellor, or handle a crisis that is happening right now. If you are in crisis, close this page and ring 13 11 14.
How to raise a concern
If something here has upset you, misled you, or been handled badly, tell us. That includes a fact in a risk warning that you think is wrong or gratuitous, a lesson that landed harder than it should have, a decision about your account, or the way you were treated.
- Where it goes. feedback@tibbi.org.au, or the form on the contact page. Acknowledged within two business days, answered within ten.
- Who handles it. A named person, who tells you their name. Anything about the content of a risk warning, a critical-state screen or a run-ending screen also goes to the clinical adviser, who can pull content and whose decision cannot be overruled — that boundary is set out here.
- Complaining never affects your access. Not your account, not your tokens, not your cooldown, not what the product shows you. There is no route by which a complaint could change any of them even if someone wanted it to.
- You can complain anonymously, though we then have no way to tell you what happened.
- If our answer is not good enough, take it to the Gambling Harm Prevention team at the ACT Gambling and Racing Commission — gamblingharmprevention@act.gov.au, 02 6207 0359 (option 4). For anything about your data, the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner on 1300 363 992.
This is not a channel for a crisis. It is read in office hours, Monday to Friday. If you need someone now, ring 1800 858 858 or 13 11 14 — they are at the top of this page for a reason.
What a complaint cannot undo
Being honest about this saves people the worst kind of disappointment. Three things in the product are outside everybody's reach, including ours, and no complaint moves them:
- Cooldown days. Whole days, held against server time. Nobody can shorten or lift one.
- The token ledger. Append-only. Entries are never edited or reversed, and tokens are never issued outside the two learning paths.
- A lost Family asset. Permanent. The ability to restore it does not exist anywhere in the system.
These are not policies that a firm enough complaint might shift. They were deliberately removed from the product so that no amount of pressure — from a user, from staff, or from anyone above them — could bring them back.
About measurement
We count how often this support panel is shown and how often it is tapped, because that is one of the measures of whether the product does anything. Those counts are anonymised and carry no identity. If you leave the app to ring a helpline, that is recorded as a good outcome — nothing here is built to keep you from going.