Online bookies ‘use cartoons to target children’

GAMBLING firms using children’s cartoon characters to promote online betting are being investigated by regulators.

Bookmakers have been accused of targeting youngsters with gambling games featuring storybook characters including Peter Pan and Jack and The Beanstalk. Some of the games can be played for free without age verification, while others have stakes of up to £600.

The industry has denied deliberately targeting children, but the Advertising Standards Agency last night said it was investigating.

Betting firms are not allowed to target under-18s, but the Gambling Commission said it feared children were being enticed into online gambling.

The body – which has found that 450,000 children are gambling in England and Wales every week is reviewing the rules on gambling products that might appeal to children.

Colourful cartoon betting online games include Unicorn Bliss and Fluffy Too Mega Jackpot. Shadow culture spokesman Tom Watson said: ‘This loophole is ruthlessly exploited by irresponsible bookies and it’s one that urgently needs closing. The Gambling Commission should act now to extend the current ban on targeting games at children to online products.’

The investigation by the Sunday Times found more than 30 exam- ples of games which could appeal to children.

An Advertising Standards Authority spokesman last night said it was ‘carefully looking into’ the websites highlighted.

He added: ‘We have strict rules on gambling advertising to protect under-18s including that ads must not be directed at or appeal to them.’ Lord Sugar, who has called for tougher restrictions on gambling advertising, told the newspaper: ‘This is absolutely wrong and the regulator needs to step in.

‘They have been too soft. We are creating a gambling culture, particularly among the young.’

Professor Mark Griffiths, of the international gaming research unit at Nottingham Trent Univer- sity, said: ‘ Research has shown that when we look at those children who are problem gamblers, the number one risk factor is playing games online for free.

‘Children are getting access via their mobile phone to these games in a much easier way than even five years ago.’

A Gambling Commission report published last year revealed that 6 per cent of 11 to 15-year- olds had gambled online using their parents’ account. Three per cent had also made bets online using their own money.

The Local Government Association last month raised fears television advertising was also luring children to place bets. It revealed one in 10 children aged between 11 and 15 were ‘following’ gambling firms on social media.

The Remote Gambling Association, which represents online operators, said age-verification tests prevented most children from gambling.

The Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport said: ‘The industry must do more in terms of social responsibility and this is an issue we are addressing.’

ASINISTER ditty by the long- retired American satirical songwriter Tom Lehrer flashed into my mind yesterday morning. The song, called The Old Dope Peddler, contains the following verse: ‘ He gives the kids free samples/because he knows full well/that today’s young innocent faces/will be tomorrow’s clientele’.

Lehrer was describing illegal drug pushers. But what I read in yesterday’s papers was about the promotion to children of a no less insidious form of addiction — and, in this country, absolutely legal.

An investigation by the Sunday Times revealed that some of Britain’s largest gambling firms are targeting children with online betting featuring their favourite cartoon and storybook characters.

These games, many of which are accessible without age- verification checks, include Peter Pan on the Paddy Power website, Jack and the Beanstalk on the 888 website and Moon Princess on the Casinoland website.

These and other firms appear to be exploiting a loophole in the regulations. The Gambling Commission bans bookmakers and casinos from providing ‘facilities for gambling in such a way as to appeal particularly to children’: but this rule does not, for some reason, apply to online games.

Cynical

Yet online is, to an ever-increasing extent, where the action is. Britons now gamble a stupefying £18 bn a year in online casino-type games. And young people, more than any other section of society, have the internet — and, in particular, the smartphones for which so many of these gambling games are designed — at the centre of their lives.

So it is not surprising (though profoundly depressing) that the Gambling Commission estimates the number of children gambling each week in this country has reached almost half a million.

Much of that will come through football, far and away the most popular sport among the young in this country. Here, too, a loophole allows children to be targeted. While TV advertisements for gambling (which dominate the commercial breaks on sports channels) are not allowed before the so-called watershed — as if children don’t stay up — an exception is made for live sporting events.

This is either based on the belief that children are somehow specially protected when they are watching gambling ads during a live broadcast, or — and which do you think is more likely? — on a cynical accommodation with the gambling firms which bankroll both football clubs and the television channels that broadcast their matches.

These advertisements typically portray gambling as a joyous social activity, with happy and laughing young people making their bets on a smartphone while talking with a group of friends.

It is a grotesque and self- serving misrepresentation of reality — which is that online gambling is a lonely, unsmiling, socially isolating activity. I was not totally surprised when it emerged that Stephen Paddock — who last weekend murdered 58 people and injured hundreds of others in Las Vegas — had, in the last few months of his life, become a full- time and obsessive gambler.

He never spoke to any of his neighbours, one of whom explained: ‘He would gamble all night and sleep during the day, and that’s why we never saw him.’

I’m not saying Paddock’s murderousness was related to his online gambling obsession: we will probably never know what caused him to carry out an action of such monumental wickedness.

But by spending every waking hour alone, focused entirely on the arid, sterile, meaninglessness of these so- called ‘games’ — devoid of any form of moral engagement with the real world — it was possible for him to become so detached from humanity that he acted as inhumanely as he did.

Gambling, in fact, wrecks many more lives than did Stephen Paddock — though not, of course, with such lethal violence.

And this has been an inexorably increasing curse in this country, since the Labour government liberalised the industry in 2005 — allowing not just the airwaves to be polluted by its ghastly advertisements, but also the nation’s High Streets to be covered, toxically, with the fixed-odds betting terminals described as the ‘crack-cocaine of gambling.’

Debts

For gambling can become a much more insidious form of addiction than any other. When someone is addicted to drink, his or her behaviour (and even appearance) makes it pretty clear there is a problem. That makes it easier — although still horrendously difficult — for the addict’s family to recognise it and try to get it treated.

But gambling addiction, in part because it is so solitary, is impossible to spot if the person affected does not want his family to discover the truth. I know two women — now widows — who discovered the extent of their husbands’ gambling addiction only when it emerged that they had secretly incurred vast debts to fund their habit. In each case, the bereaved wife suddenly had to cope with the discovery that her financial security was a chimera. All the money had gone, and then some. Both had to sell their home to pay off their dead spouse’s gambling debts.

Marriages are also destroyed when the wife (and it is usually the men who are the addicts) realises what is going on.

This, too, is on the increase. Divorce Online, a firm which logs all uncontested divorce petitions, last year revealed that gambling is now cited as a cause for the marital break-up in no fewer than one in five of such petitions. Only a few years ago, it was cited in only one out of every 15 such claims. Yet some advertisements on behalf of the gambling industry actually promote the idea that it’s something which can rescue couples from financial distress.

The Advertising Standards Authority last month upheld complaints against ads appearing on three websites which told how ‘William’ who was ‘£130,000 in debt after having to sell the house and continue to pay for his wife’s cancerrelated bills that their insurance wouldn’t cover’ was rescued when he won ‘over 30 times his annual salary in a single spin . . . His debt and financial worries came to an abrupt end’.

This disgustingly manipulative copy (masquerading as a real ‘news story’) was posted by so- called ‘ affiliates’ of Ladbrokes, SkyBet, 888 and Casumo.

Phoney

The tale was identical but mentioned each of their ‘games’ in separate versions. These affiliates are agencies paid to direct gamblers to online casinos and bookmakers. The bookmakers concerned said that they had not approved or condoned the ‘fake news’ posted by their affiliates: but they all stood to benefit from the gullible fools who believed the story was real.

A rare insight into what the companies involved really think was provided last month by an ex- employee of an online bookie, who published an article (anonymously) about his experiences.

‘When I sat down for my interview, the first thing I was asked was whether I minded working for an industry without a moral compass. If I did have any ethics, they said, I would have to throw them out of the window.’

The author described how ‘the market is saturated with gambling offers and phoney bonuses.

‘Winning from “free bets” must be re-staked dozens of times to satisfy the terms and conditions of the offer. Some companies offer “free bonuses” after the introductory “free” bet: another one of many ways that we would dangle carrots in front of our customers’ faces, knowing that, more often than not, it would lead them to play with real money’.

Phoney ‘free bets’ (with ‘real money’ the target) are exactly what’s being offered by those ads tailored to children.

Like that drug pusher in Tom Lehrer’s creepy refrain, they know exactly what they are doing. Such businesses are hooking young people into a habit which could destroy their lives.

It is bizarre that in an age when any form of promotion of cigarettes is banned, those profiting from a genuine vice have been liberated to advertise — and in ever more insidious ways.

The Government commissions public information films for our TV screens which show the physical damage and grief caused by addiction to nicotine.

At the very least, it should commission similar films about the poverty and family ruin caused by gambling addiction. And the industry itself should fund them.

Let the pusher pay.