Problem Gambling: A Growing Concern With Online Betting

As online gambling increases, more people are losing more money than they can afford. In this limited series, the WVPB news team takes a closer look at problem gambling in West Virginia.

In our first story, News Director Eric Douglas speaks with Sheila Moran, director of Marketing and Communications for First Choice Services, the company that runs West Virginia’s gambling helpline, Problem Gambling Help Network, 1-800-GAMBLER (1-800-426-2537). 

Moran is also a certified gambling counselor. 

The helpline is available 24 hours a day and connects individuals who may be struggling with problems due to gambling behaviors with the resources they need. 

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity. 

Douglas: Let’s talk about the problem generally. First, tell me about gambling addiction. What is it? What drives it? How does it affect people? 

Moran: So gambling addiction works in much the same way as other addictions. Of course it’s psychological. You’re not putting anything into your body, but that doesn’t mean that you’re any less addicted to it. For anyone who’s skeptical of that, think about people in your life that you say are addicted to their smartphones, that they seem like they’re staring at it all the time. They are also not putting anything in their body. Same thing with, for instance, marijuana. People talk about, you can’t be physically addicted, but you can have a psychological effect. The psychological is really what lingers in the long-term with addiction, even if you go through a detox for other drugs, it’s what is more of the long-term problem.

Douglas: An addiction is when it starts affecting your life or your ability to do your job. If you just do something regularly, it’s not necessarily an addiction, but when it starts having impacts on your life is when it becomes an addiction. 

Moran: Yes, that’s perfect. We always say it’s not how much you do it, and it’s not about the money we’ve had. People call us who, at one point in their life were millionaires, it just takes them a little bit longer to get to the bottom of the pile of money. So it’s about how it’s affecting your life, continuing to do something even though it’s causing you problems. 

Douglas: 2019 is when online gambling really started to take off. The advertising money really took off in 2019, 2020, it might have moderated a little bit, but it’s still huge. How big is online gambling now?

Moran: So around 2018, I think, was the Supreme Court decision that allowed online gambling, and it took a little while in most places to get it off the ground, and that’s when you started to see more advertising. It’s been a really big shift for us at the 1-800-GAMBLER helpline. We were used to taking calls from people playing slot machines at casinos or video poker machines in restaurants and bars for probably 15, 20 years. That’s the main type of person calling us. Anyone can get addicted, but I would say middle aged women were kind of typical, which is different than other states. But that type of gambling, the Video Lottery terminals and the slots, attracts women. I’m talking about the little hot spots that you see in neighborhoods. 

So then about three years ago, we started seeing a really big shift in our numbers. Not only did our helpline calls double, but we started seeing more men. Now it’s far more men than women calling us and much younger people. Yeah, I used to say young people aren’t going to call a helpline. I was wrong. They’re calling.

Douglas: I think I saw that in your annual report that about 70% of it are men and younger men, the 18 to 40 age group, or something in that range. That’s been the shift. 

Moran: We’ve had young people, even some high school students calling us. Don’t get a lot of those. I mean, that’s coming down the road, believe me, but definitely younger people, certainly a lot of college age people. 

Douglas: Technically, they can’t use those things, but we all know kids have been doing things that they’re not supposed to do for hundreds of years. 

Moran: What a surprise that kids can find ways around that. But gambling is a little bit unique, because while parents may be more respectful of the idea that you shouldn’t drink at a certain age, they tend to think gambling is less of a problem. I mean, go to any local high school prom or graduation, you are likely to see a casino theme. There’s games in the high schools. We talk to kids, we do presentations at high schools, and we hear that they’re all gambling. We know that it’s not unusual for dad to set his son up with the sports gambling app. It’s just not looked at as harmful. People don’t see it as something that you can get addicted to, which is a long=term struggle for us.

Douglas: Let’s talk about what happens to a problem gambler. What’s the progression like?

Moran: That has changed. Sometimes it would take years and years before you would kind of end up in a hole and in some trouble. And what we started seeing with electronic gambling was that it was much faster, and within a couple years, people were losing everything, and now with online, with mobile betting, it’s been a tremendous shift, because it can be so quick. 

Douglas: What do you see happen? I mean, is it that they get behind on their bills? They’ve suddenly spent the kid’s college money. 

Moran: So people start out gambling, what we call safer gambling. The rules for safer gambling on our website are things like, make sure you set a limit and stick to it. So they start out like that, right? And then they end up chasing losses. 

That’s usually one of the first signs, so they lose money they didn’t mean to lose. So they go get some extra money reserved for something else to put it in to try to get that money back. And then it becomes just a vicious cycle. And before you know it, people are not paying their bills. They’re in thousands of dollars of credit card debt. They’re spending all of their savings. They’re asking friends and family for loans. 

They’re even stealing. We hear story after story from people who have embezzled money to gamble, and it’s striking because so often these are the type of folks that you would never imagine would steal, and it’s honestly not their intention to steal it and keep it. What they say to us is, “I just thought I would take it from work, and then as soon as I won, I was going to pay it right back.” And that’s always what they meant. But of course, it doesn’t go that way. 

And we hear that from people, not just stealing from work, but from little league or the PTO festival. You know, you see these stories all the time, and a lot of times it’s not reported in the media, but it is gambling related.

Douglas: Tell me what the recovery process is.

Moran: So when people call us, we say “Talk to someone who understands.” We have people at our helpline 24 hours a day. Many of those people now at our helpline have personal experience, either themselves or a family member with gambling addiction. And so when we talk to people, the very first thing we’re going to do is, if necessary, a crisis intervention. 

Many people don’t know that gambling has one of the highest rates of suicide of any addiction. So all of our people are trained and certified in intervention. If they need to, with someone who’s feeling suicidal, that’s first, then we’re going to listen to them, listen to their story, see where they’re at, see what type of treatment they want. 

Some people are not ready for professional treatment. They want to go the self-help route. If that’s the case, we have some options for them. We have a lot of literature that we can mail them or email them. There’s a whole lot of recovery podcasts, books and online resources that we’ve curated. We don’t just Google it. We make sure that we’ve listened to them and they’re appropriate, and we give out all of that information. 

Now, if someone’s ready for professional treatment, we have a network of about 30-40 counselors. These are people who are master’s level clinicians who’ve been through a lot of training on how to help people stop gambling. They do what we call cognitive behavior therapy, or different types of intervention with them, to work with them up to 20 sessions that we can pay for so that they’re in a space that they’re able to cut down gambling or stop gambling. Whatever their goal is, they can help them with it. 

And then we have other things we can offer, such as financial counseling or self-exclusion. If you want to exclude yourself from the casinos, that’s where you’re gambling. We can get you the information on that. We even have an app we can give you for free that will block gambling sites from your phone or laptop. So we have a whole lot of different options, all free for anyone who calls us. 

Douglas: You can get yourself barred from going to a casino? 

Moran: Absolutely. If you show up, you’ll be a trespasser. So it’s operated by the West Virginia Lottery, but we have all of the forms on our website, and we can send that to anyone you know. 

It works at least, if nothing else, it’s certainly psychological. If you’ve banned yourself from going somewhere, and you know that you could get in trouble for going there, that in itself is enough to keep you from going if the casino is the only place you gamble, and there are some people that really only go to the casinos. 

We are 100% funded by the West Virginia Lottery, and that’s pretty typical. A lot of people are surprised to hear that, but if you look at states around the country, almost all of them are getting funds either from specific casinos or from their lottery. Unfortunately, there is no federal funding for gambling research or treatment nationally. There hasn’t been a big national prevalence study for many years. 

Douglas: You actually mentioned it, but the cost of treatment, what are we talking about there? 

Moran: So to callers, that is free. We pay for all of the things that I mentioned. I will say, if you go after your first session with one of our clinicians, if you have insurance that can pay for it, that may take over. However, if you can’t, if you have a high deductible copay, your insurance doesn’t cover gambling for a number of different issues we are able to pay for it. We like to really try to remove barriers from people getting treatment.

Douglas:  Have you ever seen somebody win at a casino?

Moran: Interesting that you bring up wins. When you win, what happens? It’s not just that you get a check. It is a big deal. You’ve got cocktail waitresses coming over to you. You got, like, the giant rubber check. You’ve got noises, you’ve got everyone’s attention. It is an incredible high. So no surprise, one of the major risk factors for problem gambling is having an early big win.

Douglas: Give me numbers. How many people were calling? 

Moran: So on our helpline, we take, I think maybe 4,000 plus calls a year. But I want to say a lot of those are miss dials. People kind of giggle about this, but when you see our phone number listed, it’ll say gambling problem, 1-800-GAMBLER. A lot of people misinterpret that, and they think, yep, I’m having a gambling problem. I can’t get into my account, or I can’t figure out this parlay. So they call us, thinking we are customer service, and I used to call those junk calls, or our coordinators call them opportunity calls, because they say, you never know when they might need us. 

We really can’t talk them through the IT of what’s going on with their account, but we’ll make sure to give them the correct numbers to call. So a lot of those calls are kind of miss dials. However, real calls, people calling for help, last fiscal year, we received around 1,200, and this year, so far, we’ve had around 1,400 and the year is not over, so on track to be significantly more than last year. 

That may not sound like a huge number compared to some of our other helplines, but keep in mind, people are very hesitant to call for help about gambling addiction, no matter how far down the road they are, they’re embarrassed, or they are stigmatized. They feel like this can’t be a real addiction. They don’t understand how this phone number can help them. So certainly, there should be a whole lot more people calling that phone number.

Douglas: What haven’t we talked about? What would you like to mention or discuss?

Moran: Many of the calls to our helpline are from loved ones of gamblers and their parents or their adult children, or their spouses or girlfriends, boyfriends, and so they’re saying, “He won’t call, she won’t call. But what can I do now?” We can’t go out and kidnap ’em, right, and put ’em in treatment, but what we can do is we can give them a list of resources in their area, and we can talk to them about interventions, how to do an intervention. 

Frankly, sometimes we talk to them about how to protect themselves. We’ve talked spouses through how to get their credit report, advising them to set up your own banking account. You better make sure that you know you’re not handing over your paycheck to that person who’s gambling it away. A lot of times, they need that sort of protection and guidance, because it can destroy a whole family.

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The West Virginia Problem Gambling Help Network (WVPGHN), 1-800-GAMBLER (1-800-426-2537) is available 24 hours a day and connects individuals who may be struggling with problems due to gambling behaviors with the resources they need.