A mother from Wallasey has spoken of how an innocent bingo night with colleagues spiralled into a gambling addiction that saw her steal more than £320,000 from her employer and end up in prison. Sian Mclear-Dyer, 36, was a finance manager at a property law firm when she first downloaded a bingo app after a works outing in 2015.
Within months, she was secretly gambling through the night on slot games while her husband slept, and eventually began spending all her wages. When payday loans and credit cards were no longer enough, she started taking money from her workplace. In total, she estimates she lost around £400,000 over four years. She later said she was 'living two lives' and felt too ashamed to ask for help.
Two events in 2018 finally prompted her to seek support: she lost her job and discovered she was pregnant. She was referred to Beacon Counselling Trust, a Liverpool-based charity, which she credits with saving her life. However, she still faced legal action for embezzlement and served just under a year in prison from 2019 to 2020. For the first four months of her sentence she was separated from her newborn son before he joined her in a mother-and-baby unit.
While in prison, Mclear-Dyer completed a counselling course and later earned a degree in criminology and psychology from Liverpool John Moores University. She now works as an education and brief intervention lead at Beacon, helping others with gambling problems. The charity has reported an 810 percent increase in third-party referrals over the past year, highlighting the growing scale of gambling addiction in Merseyside.
