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Smartphones have been the catalyst for an explosion of sports gambling, providing always-open portals to separate people from their money. Two companies, FanDuel and DraftKings, control over 70 percent of this online market, using sophisticated surveillance and marketing techniques to keep people betting, even when losing eats up money for groceries, utilities, rent, or the mortgage. A small but statistically significant number of bettors generate the profits that online sportsbooks haul in.
According to the American Psychiatric Association, nearly 40 percent of men and 20 percent of women gamble online daily. Two percent of those bettors gamble more than ten hours a day. Sports bettors have wagered over $600 billion since 2018. The National Council on Problem Gambling notes that about 2.5 million Americans “meet the criteria” for a severe problem; five to eight million more have mild to moderate issues.
As the country’s affordability crisis deepens, individuals and entire families can slide into cycles of addiction and debt. Bank of America warned in a November research note that gambling is creating “emerging credit risks” across the economy; an April paper from UCLA and USC found that credit scores in states that have adopted online sports betting are down, and bankruptcy rates and auto loan delinquencies are up. Eight U.S. studies found that 1 in 5 problem gamblers have tried to commit suicide, the highest rate for any addiction disorder.
Most bettors are men. They’ve gotten younger and younger as sports betting companies gamified gambling. Pokémon, the trading card and video game mega-franchise, co-opted slot machine and casino imagery in the 1990s, and technology companies latched on, eager to bring in young gamblers to replace the old heads. Public schools see problems with boys, and sports betting stokes some school officials’ fears of it becoming as ubiquitous as cellphones and as poisonous as social media.
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