The human cost of net gambling

The human cost of net gambling

It’s never been easier to place a bet — or to become a gambling addict. Tim Luckhurst sees the devastating effect this can have


Keith is desperate. “Could anyone help me,” reads his plea on the Gamblers’ Anonymous website. “I need to stop gambling on the internet. I am sick and tired of this addiction.” Fellow online betting addict Maravich says: “It’s just pure hell. It has helped me lose my job and find despair.” Jane, a single mother, found her nemesis in online bingo. She squandered a fortune in three weeks.
Richard Mahan, 25, of Brechin, took just 50 minutes. “An evil from within got the better of me,” he told his sister after he had lost £158,000 in a late-night internet betting session using his parents’ 13 credit cards.


When he realised the extent of his losses, Mahan, the father of a young child, swallowed 170 painkillers and slashed his wrists.

Mahan was sentenced last week to three years’ probation and 300 hours of community service for 13 counts of fraudulently incurring debt.

Earlier, as the online gambler was convicted, Kevin Veal, the sheriff, warned: “If £158,000 can be lost in 50 minutes under clandestine conditions in the early hours of the morning, it is an issue so great that it needs to be addressed by the wider community.”

But it’s easy to lose much more. On Tuesday, Bryan Benjafield, a 23-year-old accounts clerk from Dorset, admitted stealing £1,047,550 from his employer to fund an online gambling spree, betting on horse racing, football matches, internet poker and other games. At the peak of his addiction, Benjafield was diverting up to £17,000 of company money every day to his Ladbrokes and Skybet internet gambling accounts.

Online gambling has swept the UK with the speed and aggression of a forest fire. At least 4m people play online every month. The latest research, from Nottingham Trent University, shows that Scotland contributes £7.5 billion to the £76 billion spent annually on gambling in the UK — triple the figure of five years ago, as betting on the internet has taken hold.

It’s hard to overstate the scale of the problem. In Scotland there are estimated to be 35,000 problem gamblers, among them an office worker from Edinburgh who spent £24,000 using six credit cards on internet poker and digital roulette and a teacher from Glasgow who forged her husband’s signature, remortgaged the family home and lost the proceeds on online games.

Access to a computer terminal eliminates the need to visit a casino, race track or bookmaker. You don’t even need to get dressed to have a bet, and the arrival of broadband means players can now lose it online even faster.

Gordon House in the West Midlands, Britain’s only residential clinic for gambling addicts, has seen a 60% increase in applications over the past five years. “People can come to us having lost houses, which can involve £200,000 or £300,000,” says Ian Semel, a spokesman for the service. He blames internet gambling.

The British Medical Association agrees. At its annual conference in Belfast last month, doctors warned that instant access to online betting was fuelling an explosion in gambling addiction.

“It really is a ticking time bomb,” says Dr Robert Brown, an addiction expert, formerly of Glasgow University. “The problem is that it is so easy and the internet never shuts down. Casinos and bookmakers have to shut for a cooling-off period. During that time people can reflect on just how much money they have lost and the fact that they’ve just blown that month’s rent. But with the internet, people can bet for hours and hours without taking time to realise just how much money they have lost.”

In the Victorian era, gambling was ridiculed by dog-collared Scottish moralists as the vice of particularly weak-willed, drink-sodden, feckless men. None of them could have imagined a world in which women and children might also become addicted, sliding ever further into debt within the apparent safety of their homes.

GamCare, the gambling advice charity, reports that more than a quarter of gambling addicts now seeking its help are women, up from just 2% in 2000. More than 1,600 female gamblers made contact with the organisation last year.

On current trends as many as 20,000 may be in touch with GamCare by the end of 2006. “The problem with the internet is that it is anonymous,” says Geoffrey Godbold, GamCare’s chief executive. “You can gamble at any time of night or day without anybody interrupting you.”

sunday times