Kids grow up so fast these days: they’re getting hooked on high-stakes gambling younger than ever.
According to new reporting from the New York Times, teenagers and young adults are blowing their fortunes on shady online crypto casinos, lured there by a sleazy web of streamers and celebrities who are paid to essentially be casino recruiters.
One young man who asked to be identified only by his middle name David told the newspaper that he was just 14 years old when he placed his first bet with a crypto casino. He watched the massively popular streamer Adin Ross place outrageous and exciting bets on the sites, along with the rapper Drake. When he turned 18 this year, he converted $12,000 in childhood savings into cryptocurrency, bet it all, doubled his money, and then lost it all. He then tried to recoup his losses by gambling a $4,000 loan he took out without his parents’ knowledge, and lost that, too.
“I lost sight of what money actually is,” David told the NYT.
Online betting has exploded in popularity over the past decade. Sports betting revenue in the US alone has skyrocketed from $6.6 billion in 2018 to more than $148.7 billion last year, according to the American Gaming Association — a twenty-two fold increase. Betting companies largely target young men, and have partnered with colleges and universities in lucrative sponsorship deals to push their services on students.
And that’s just the “above-board” gambling. Crypto casinos are illegal in the US, but anyone savvy enough to use a VPN to mask their IP can access them, and funnel money into it using decentralized blockchain assets. They also have weak identity and age verification measures.
To get the youngsters hooked, sites like Stake, Roobet, Shuffle and BC.Game are relying on streamers, where on sites like Kick, they broadcast themselves gambling eye-watering amounts of crypto on the casinos for hours on end.
Something like the crypto gambler Avengers was assembled in August. In an hours-long livestream, three of some the biggest streamers in the world — Adin Ross, xQc, and Trainwreckstv — joined the rapper Drake to bet money on the casino Stake.
“I’ve dreamed of this night. All my guys in one spot,” Drake said during the stream, as quoted by the NYT.
Ross, xQc, and Trainwreck all got their start on Twitch. But when Twitch banned crypto casinos from being promoted on its platform in 2022, they eventually branched out to Kick, Twitch’s edgier, wild west of a cousin. It was no accident: Kick was founded by the founders of Stake, who wanted streamers to push their gambling games. In 2023, it signed a two-year deal with xQc worth up to $100 million to have him stream exclusively stream on the platform.
Ordinary streamers can sign up to become an affiliate of a crypto casino and earn money off their streams, including through commissions they get on bets placed by viewers who signed up using their affiliate link or code, according to the NYT. Top affiliates are paid six figure fees and higher to stream gambling content on a regular basis, former crypto casino employees told the newspaper. Meanwhile, massive names like Ross and Drake don’t earn money through affiliate programs but are instead paid millions of dollars to promote gambling to their viewers.
It’s sleazy enough to be pushing gambling on young audiences. But it also appears that the casinos are deceiving them, too, because those titillating, high figure bets that draw in viewers aren’t exactly real. Two affiliate streamers told the NYT that the wagers in their videos have no real stakes. The money they bet is provided by the casino, and they don’t keep their winnings.
Perhaps it’s disclosed in the fine print somewhere — but it’s enough to fool young, online teens.
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