Study of FOBT Punters Conducted

The Responsible Gambling Trust has conducted a study of Fixed Odds Betting Terminal (FOBT) punters which it released on Wednesday. A total of 4,000 UK punters were involved in the study done by NatCen. The Guardian reported that it revealed high numbers of problem gambling. NatCen pointed out that “not all problem gamblers had very low incomes” but said that “disproportionately more problem gamblers had low incomes than non-problem gamblers”. According to the study “....high harmful gambling action and consequence scores had shorter session lengths, on average, than others: their average session length was around 13 minutes compared with around 18 minutes for other groups”. Adrian Parkinson of the Campaign for Fairer Gambling said, “We've long argued that drug dealers who start money-laundering to legitimise their criminal earnings on FOBTs, especially the younger ones, very quickly get drawn into the addictive nature of high-stake roulette play. Combined with welfare payments there is a strong case that these machines are taking both illicit money and that of the state welfare system.” Heather Wardle of NatCen said that those involved in the survey did not represent all gamblers which could “skew the data”. “Unfortunately, we don't know enough about non-loyalty card holders to be able to weight the estimates back to a population estimate,” she said. “Given that this sample is skewed to those who are most highly engaged in gambling, the figures are broadly commensurate with what you might expect. For example, a 2010 gambling survey estimated that 13 percent of those who played machines on a monthly basis were problem gamblers.” A spokesman for the Association of British Bookmakers said, “The industry welcomes the findings of this report and we will now use this evidence to help determine how the industry can further help those customers who may be at risk ... “We are pleased that this research has deliberately focused on regular gamblers, rather than the general population. Some of our members are already using gaming machine customer data to identify potential problems and, thereby better targeting customer interventions.”