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The real victims of Britain’s gambling chokehold Bloated profits mean companies can buy users attention

Almost 70% of Brits say they gamble regularly. Credit: Getty

Almost 70% of Brits say they gamble regularly. Credit: Getty


June 27, 2024   7 mins

On the evening of 1 March, 2019, Mark Bradshaw nearly killed himself. It was the gambling that did it. By that stage, after 20 years of betting, each month would start with the realisation that he needed to find £30,000 — “Just,” he says, “to keep the wheels in motion.” 

Overwhelmed, Bradshaw loaded his few remaining possessions into a clapped-out Jag, and boarded a ferry from Cork to Santander. He had planned to travel on to Portugal, the site of so many holidays with his wife and kids. But they no longer saw him. And where the open sea once promised escape, staring into the ship’s wake now pushed Bradshaw, 36 to despair. 

“Look at the wake of mess I’ve left behind me — look at the lies I’ve told,” Bradshaw remembers thinking. “I don’t know where the fuck I’m going. I haven’t got a house to go anymore, nor a home and I’ve fucked my kids’ lives. That’s when it really hit me. The world would look a lot better without me in it.” In the end, it was the thought of his two sons that stopped Bradshaw from jumping overboard that March night. But not everyone is so lucky. 

In the United Kingdom, this week’s front pages — dominated by reports of an election mired in a betting scandal — threaten to distract from a wider malaise: the fact that there are around 400 gambling-related suicides each year. Just like Bradshaw, young people seem particularly susceptible. Between an underdeveloped brain on the one hand, and frantic advertising from gambling companies on the other, some 55,000 British youngsters (age 11-16) are addicted to gambling. A further 85,000 also believed to be at risk of addiction. 

No wonder activists are pushing hard for change. But without more fundamental reforms — and with the gambling industry as rich and influential as ever — desperate cases like Bradshaw’s are unlikely to disappear.  

Mark thinks he knows why. The neuroscience of gambling addiction closely resembles that of drink or drug dependency. Gambling rewires the brain, flooding it with so much dopamine that the body soon learns to protect itself. That, in turn, reduces the sensitivity of so-called “bliss hormones” — which become less responsive to the high gained from that first successful flutter. As dopamine tolerance builds, punters need to raise the stakes to recreate those early peaks. “Even if it’s a 1,000-to-1 shot,” Mark says, “right down to that very last bet, you convince yourself this is the one that could change my life.” Enter fully-fledged gambling disorders: the neurological state when the brain experiences withdrawal symptoms, and demands higher bets, just to get back to its altered new normal. 

“When you’re betting, the capacity for rational thought goes out the window,” Ryan Cowley explains. “But after heavy losses you get this crushing feeling of guilt.” At his lowest point, the 30-year-old was losing almost £4,000 a day, even as he grew skilled at hiding his problem from family: “I’d start with South American football, switch to the NFL and then of course there’s always horse racing and online slots.’’ Once, he blew his wages on payday — then cancelled and destroyed his bank cards, pretending his wallet had been stolen. He needed an excuse to not pay his mum the room and board she was expecting. 

Beyond the raw brain chemistry, there’s evidence that young people, like Cowley, are particularly vulnerable to gambling disorders. As Dr Marc Potenza, director of Yale University’s Center of Excellence in Gambling Research explains, the prefrontal cortex doesn’t fully mature until around the age of 24. He suggests that, especially for young men, this makes them less able to postpone gratification and control impulsivity — and ultimately leaves them open to the highly addictive products developed by gambling companies. 

Those products, for their part, are made vastly more dangerous by their digital nature. Consider Cowley, whose gambling problem started around 12 years ago, and coincided with the arrival of smartphones and betting apps in his late teens. Suddenly, he not only had a casino in his pocket, but also the power to bet on anything, anywhere. He’s not alone. As a survey published by the Young Gamers and Gamblers Education Trust (YGAM) in March 2024 revealed, nearly 46% of students are gambling more than they can afford, lured by promises of free bets and quick cash. 

Now 23, Robert* has been battling a gambling addiction for five years. His problems began while still a student, when betting became intertwined with watching sport with friends. Watching them celebrate occasional windfalls on their phone drew him in — and soon Robert was losing more and more. When Robert’s parents entrusted a significant amount of his grandfather’s inheritance to him, they were unaware of his problem. But Robert gambled away £15,000 over just a couple of days. “Pretty much all of it is gone,” he says. “I still haven’t been able to pluck up the courage to tell my parents.”

It deepens the problem when gambling companies use the immense power of online systems to their advantage. If you have a gambling platform on your phone, you may have noticed just how regularly you’re required to re-download the latest version of the app. For Bradshaw, that’s some indication of just how rapidly betting operators are evolving their “getting-to-know-you” data-harvesting techniques.

“Within three months of signing up with a betting app,” he explains, “they will have collected 90 key data points, which will go far beyond what your favourite team is, or the time of the day you like to bet. They’ll know exactly which offers to push at you, all tailored to make you feel really smart — too smart to miss out on this great opportunity. And all the time they’re demanding your attention with products that are incredibly addictive.”

In theory, racking up huge losses in betting binges, like Mark, Ryan and Robert’s, was about to become more difficult, with affordability checks set to be introduced as part of the government white paper on gambling reform published a year ago. It proposed that players who lose £1,000 within 24 hours, or £2,000 over 90 days, should face financial checks. Those who have a net loss beyond £125 each month, or £500 per year, will have to go through “frictionless” checks. Alongside affordability checks, the white paper also included significant proposals for a mandatory levy on gambling operators to fund addiction treatment, education and research.

Now, of course, we have an election on our hands, which will likely delay the implementation of some of the reforms. At the same time, however, many do not require primary legislation and are due to come into force later in the year anyway. But will they make any real difference?

Many anti-gambling campaigners argue that by the time customers demonstrate problematic betting behaviours, it is already too late: they will already have a gambling disorder, and though their betting may temporarily be stopped, the underlying condition doesn’t disappear. Gambling With Lives, for example, is a charity set up in 2018 by families bereaved by gambling related suicide. While they applaud the £100 million earmarked to fund research, education and treatment around gambling addiction, activists are otherwise sceptical about the planned legislation’s overall worth. 

Bradshaw, meanwhile, believes that the law isn’t keeping pace with the technology. Just as the UK’s 2005 Gambling Act couldn’t foresee the harms of the coming smartphone era, he suggests that today’s policymakers don’t understand how AI has already transformed the industry. ‘’It doesn’t refer to algorithms or artificial intelligence at all,” he says of the Gambling Reform Bill.It is an analogue piece of legislation in an era [when] the gambling operators are already in an AI generation. Using the power of artificial intelligence, hundreds of markets are being formed within each game using all the data they’ve got on the sport, plus all the data on you as an individual. The products are incredibly addictive and the markets are formed so fast that the smartest human being couldn’t work out if it’s a fair bet or not, which of course is precisely the point.” 

“The markets are formed so fast that the smartest human being couldn’t work out if it’s a fair bet or not, which of course is precisely the point.”

For others, the white paper’s most serious omission concerns advertising, which many attribute to the influence of the immensely powerful Betting and Gaming Council, the industry body that represents the interests of UK gambling operators. Since it was effectively deregulated in 2005, the UK gambling industry has swollen into a behemoth, one raking in revenues of £15 billion a year. As a whole, it’s estimated that the sector redirects £1.5 billion of those profits into advertising. That can have a direct impact on gamblers: research suggests that 35% of people with gambling disorders receive daily incentives to gamble, compared to just 4% of those not suffering gambling harm.

The personal impact here is just as stark. Cowley says he’s forced to go on holiday during big events like the Cheltenham Festival, just to avoid being carpet-bombed by betting ads. In April, betting giant 888.com even planted its flag in London’s underground system, with signs provocatively proclaiming that “This Carriage is now a Casino”.

In the end, an online petition forced 888.com to partly withdraw the campaign, but such brazenness can plausibly be linked to the sector’s vast wealth. 888 Holdings also owns William Hill, which was fined £19.2 million in 2023 for — among other failings — allowing customers to lose tens of thousands of pounds within minutes of opening their accounts during the pandemic. That’s still the largest fine ever meted out by the Gambling Commission, but is unlikely to deter 888 Holdings, which last year saw revenues soar by 38% to £1.7 billion.

And therein lies the problem: gambling is an industry that has grown so rich so fast that it can afford to casually treat multi-million-pound fines as simply part of doing business.

Quite apart from the individual suffering, meanwhile, there is rising evidence that gambling addiction is impacting society as a whole. The government’s own research estimates that 0.5% of the population are already problem gamblers. And while the NHS recently opened its 15th regional treatment centre in Sheffield and now has the capacity to treat 3,000 across the UK, many believe it’s unlikely to be enough. With legislation still so weak, Mark Bradshaw thinks we’re in the early days of a public health disaster: he compares it to an “avalanche” that could yet overwhelm the authorities.

But at least he got out. Five years on from his near-death experience at sea, the Yorkshireman seems happier. At 41, he’s living in Dublin with a new family, and spends his time campaigning to protect the next generation of young people from gambling disorders. Regardless, Bradshaw is under no illusions about how dangerous the modern industry can be. “If I’d come of age in an era when sports-mad young men spend half their lives on their phones,” he says, “I would be dead by now.” 


Sean T. Smith is a journalist and author.

seansmithwrites

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Nell Clover
Nell Clover
4 months ago

Just a small correction, but perhaps one that explains why this was allowed to happen.

Contrary to the author suggesting the UK’s 2005 Gambling Act couldn’t foresee the harms of the coming smartphone era, the opposite was true. Indeed, the very introductory text to the Bill stated “The Act recognises and accommodates the significant technological changes… The Act requires regulation of gambling where the player is not present on the operator’s premises… via interactive television or the internet.”

The Act was specifically written to facilitate more and new forms of remote gambling. The objective was simple: internet gambling was expected to become big business and existing UK laws would prevent the UK capturing a slice of a new international market. The expected harms to UK citizens were collateral damage for protecting and enhancing the contribution gambling would make to future UK GDP and tax take.

From immigration to gambling regulations, it is all about finding new ways to increase GDP and increase tax revenue because we don’t know how to generate organic growth anymore. There are no taboos, the only limit is the time it takes to shift the Overton window to make the unacceptable acceptable. If you think of yourself as living on a GDP farm, you are GDP livestock. The GDP farm is designed to maximise your GDP yield, even if your GDP teets get mastitis and your GDP hooves get abscesses. Mark Bradshaw’s GDP produce was gambling.

Simon Blanchard
Simon Blanchard
4 months ago

I celebrated in 1997, like many. But I found it puzzling when Tony Blair’s government liberalised all the gambling laws and unharnessed this beast. What were they thinking? Tax revenue I suppose but likely collected from their traditional voter base, and no one seemed to mind. Not their last betrayal of course, but with hindsight a straw in the wind.

SIMON WOLF
SIMON WOLF
4 months ago

Before New Labour all UK punters had to pay 9% tax on their bets.Labour abolished the 9 % tax and every punter welcomed it not least the many recreational punters who could make a small profit before tax but not above 9 % .

peter lucey
peter lucey
4 months ago
Reply to  SIMON WOLF

True, but the tax was abolished, in return for a levy on profits I think, because, wth the internet, the betting companies went offshore to escape UK tax.

Wrt punters and small profits, no-one makes money on betting except the house anyway (?)

Andrew Thompson
Andrew Thompson
4 months ago

Ban all off site gambling. Won’t solve the problem but it’ll save a few lives (and unfortunately cost the government £billions in tax revenues so that’s that then)

Tony Price
Tony Price
4 months ago

I agree, but also no ‘free’ incentives; i.e. free bets, hospitality etc. So simple to do and so easy to enforce, unlike online advertising which is virtually uncontrollable. Like regulation of vaping, eg banning disposable vapes, which would be so very simple, easy and quick if only government wanted to do it and could fight off the very well-funded lobbyists. But a government which has spent considerable effort to dismantle trading standards and environmental regulation enforcement is unlikely to care about regulations designed to benefit wider society rather than its funders.

McLovin
McLovin
4 months ago
Reply to  Tony Price

Free bets don’t need to be italicised. It’s comparatively easy to make a few hundred quid from the sign up free bet offers. It’s literally a give away.
“The neuroscience of gambling addiction closely resembles that of drink or drug dependency.” In which case treat it like an addiction, don’t tell everybody else how to spend their money. Alcohol ruins lives as well but nobody is telling us how much we can spend a month on drink.

McLovin
McLovin
4 months ago

Banning offsite gambling isn’t going to work is it, because this is the 21st Century and its perfectly possible to bet already online with bookmakers based in Panama or Curacao.

Simon Blanchard
Simon Blanchard
4 months ago

Tax gambling at the same level as petrol.

Lancashire Lad
Lancashire Lad
4 months ago

And cigarettes.

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
4 months ago

I was a croupier on the 80s and was duly gobsmacked by labour’s changes to the rather good 1968 gaming act.
I learned a number of things in that job and one of them is that where there’s gambling, organised crime is never far away.
If the big providers can afford to shrug off fines then where do their activities shade over into being deliberate infringements of the law, and when does this cross over into being organised crime?

Chris Milburn
Chris Milburn
4 months ago

“Gambling rewires the brain”. Newsflash. So does everything you do regularly, and especially those things that give you a dopamine hit. Thus we now have sex, food, internet, exercise, etc addicts. A word that once was reserved for drugs of abuse has crept into other realms.
Our materialistic, rationalist society has reclassified moral and ethical failings into a medical problem, thus to be solved by doctors and other “experts”, with the assistance of the nanny state. This is a destructive idea that quashes individual responsibility and agency, and actually makes the problem worse.

McLovin
McLovin
4 months ago

“It proposed that players who lose £1,000 within 24 hours, or £2,000 over 90 days, should face financial checks. Those who have a net loss beyond £125 each month, or £500 per year”. How many people commenting on here have lost more than £500/year on shares or on cryptocurrency??