25,000 kids are problem gamblers
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buzz. It felt like free money. I only regretted not placing bigger bets on my wins, ignoring my losses, and started going bigger and bigger.
“I was placing £100 bets, and then a few weeks later I was regularly betting £1,000 a day.
“By then I was down by several thousand pounds, and the only way I could think of getting it back was by more betting.
“I was spending around six hours a day betting or researching bets. I missed football training, I skipped homework. Betting was the only thing I could think about.” When his father got the call from the bank and checked the statements, he and his wife knew straight away what was going on. The 43-year-old company director said: “We were just so angry, not just at him, but also at ourselves for having been naive and trusting. “We had been so preoccupied with our own lives we hadn’t noticed his school grades going down.” The boy started weekly one-to-one sessions with psychotherapist Steve Pope along with weekly group sessions with other addicts. But five months later he had a relapse. He found his dad’s wallet with a credit card and went on a week-long £60,000 gambling binge.
He said: “It was like this monster in my head calling me to go back.”
A week later his dad had another call from the bank saying the huge amount had gone. The father said: “I seriously thought our business and our house would be lost.
“We had to make a couple of redundancies. We couldn’t even tell those employees the real reason why this had happened. We felt simply terrible.” The father says they will be paying back the loan for the foreseeable future. He said: “We are lucky that we didn’t lose everything. “Now other children might start stealing or securing loans to pay for their gambling addiction. “It’s as bad as being a heroin addict – the lack of trust, the secrecy, the deceit, but without the obvious signs of drug addiction.” Politicians are calling for betting companies to face the same advertising regulations as tobacco firms in a bid to stem the epidemic of child gamblers.
Earlier this week a cross-party group of MPS wrote an open letter to Culture Secretary Matthew Hancock insisting on a gambling ad ban during live sporting events and before the watershed.
They claim that an increasing number of gambling adverts are now being aimed at children.
The number of 16-year-olds hooked on gambling has risen by a third in the last three years, according to Government regulator the Gambling Commission.