An alarming fact has recently been uncovered in regard to underage gambling. As many as one third of all online gambling websites apparently permit people who are under the age of 18 to play on their sites and bet. Through an official Gambling Commission investigation, it was discovered that more than 33% of all online casinos and bookmakers had easily surmountable hoops and loopholes that young people could bypass in order to get their gambling fix online. Through the Gambling Act that came into being back in 2007, a company or online casino operator that is in possession of an online gaming license in the United Kingdom is required to comply with very strict checks and balances to ensure that all underage gambling is prevented to the greatest extent possible.

 Approximately 164 different companies are allowed to run some 250 websites online. The numbers uncovered by the commission were determined by analyzing debit cards that belong to people who are under the age of 18. This data was used to decipher whether sites did indeed contain loopholes that allowed young people to conquer the barriers in place and succeed in placing bets online. If they were not weeded out through some sort of age-vetting process, there is something terribly wrong with the system and this will be a defining issue for the industry to confront in the coming years.

Politicians point to the results of this investigation as a huge danger for the young people of the country  and this means that the risk for underage gambling addiction is bigger than anyone had previously thought. The safeguards put in place by the government have obviously not been enough to curb this very serious problem.

Tags: Online Gambling, underage gambling

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 17th, 2009 at 2:16 am and is filed under Online Gambling. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.