Interventions for Online Gambling Addiction With Vulnerable Populations

This paper looks at the modern rise of online gambling, what has been done to address it, and how we can improve upon them in the future. Online gambling is gambling done through a digital medium with two distinct forms: gambling adjacent activities (GAAs), and general online gambling. GAAs are activities that highly resemble gambling, but are legally distinct from gambling due to different kinds of obfuscation like using in-game currency to gamble instead of directly real world money. General online gambling is much clearer about it being gambling with many kinds of gambling activities to partake in from digital slots to online sports betting. The impact can be felt across two distinct age groups: adolescents and adults. Adolescents are mainly affected by gambling adjacent activities due to the lack of strict age limits to engage in GAAs, and as a result GAAs act as a gateway to more severe kinds of gambling. Adults are mainly affected by general online gambling with its ease of access and variety of gambling activities to engage with, and as a result this exacerbates existing gambling addictions. Interventions into this issue of online gambling come in two main forms: legal interventions and individual interventions. Government interventions are focused on restrictions or bans of online gambling, but these suffer from a variety of issues such as lack of enforcement, lengthy process of being implemented, and the possibility of that intervention being repealed. Individual interventions come in more variety, and are generally more effective and reliable than government interventions, but these still come with their own issues. While individual interventions come in many forms, many of those forms have yet to show any significant results in reducing harmful gambling behavior. Since many of these interventions have not been explored in great detail, this paper suggests that these interventions could be reworked to better suit the ever growing problems that online gambling poses.