Misc More than third of betting machine players experience problems with gambling

More than a third of people playing high-speed, high-stakes betting machines experience problems with their gambling, according to industry-funded research released on Wednesday.

The study involving 4,000 gamblers, which was commissioned by the Responsible Gambling Trust, revealed alarmingly high levels of problem gambling with fixed-odds betting terminals.

FOBTs have been dubbed by critics as the “crack cocaine of gambling” because they allow stakes of £100 to be laid every 20 seconds on casino games.

The researchers found that 37% of respondents experience “problems with machine gambling” somewhere between “some of the time” to “almost always”. This compares to a problem gambling rate of 0.4% for all adults, according to 2012 government health studies.

NatCen also found that the players who frequent the UK’s 9,000 betting shops were likely to be poor, jobless and not white. Bookmakers rely on the revenue from the country’s machines, which take £1.5bn from punters.

Campaigners point out that the data showed that these problem gamblers were depositing huge amounts of cash – £1,200 a week – into the machines. This from a group where a third of men had incomes of less than £10,400 a year.

Adrian Parkinson of the Campaign for Fairer Gambling, who is a former industry executive, said the study raised questions over where the money for gambling was coming from: “We’ve long argued that drug dealers who start money-laundering to legitimise their criminal earnings on FOBTs, especially the younger ones very quickly get drawn into the addictive nature of high-stake roulette play. Combined with welfare payments there is a strong case that these machines are taking both illicit money and that of the state welfare system.”

Source.