Sports betting gains popularity among boys / Web
The proliferation of casinos and virtual betting pages worries specialists, especially due to the popularity it has gained among young people.
It is that the boys turn to the world of sports betting at an increasingly early age, to the point that from Gamblers Anonymous they assured that many of those who approach in search of help reveal that they started playing at the age of 13.
The specialists argued that it is not an isolated phenomenon but rather is related to the context, the economic crisis and the lack of predictability, added to the constant hyperconnectivity to which young people are exposed, make the promise of obtaining money easy and fast. be a tempting offer.
In this framework, from the Observatory of Addictions and Problematic Consumption of the Ombudsman’s Office, they assured that during the last year they registered a constant increase in the consultation of young people with compulsive gambling problems. What set off all the alarms since it is a problem that not only brings economic consequences but also has an impact on mental health.
It was the World Health Organization (WHO) itself that defined pathological gambling as an emotional disease that affects aspects of the personal, family, work, social and economic life of those who suffer from it.
According to data from the Observatory of Addictions and Problematic Consumption, at least 30% of the population maintains some type of link with gambling. Of them, 95% claim to do it recreationally, while 3.5% are problem gamblers and the remaining 1.5% have compulsive problems.
Virtuality and advertising
With the quarantine, many activities ended up going digital and gambling was one of them, people no longer needed to leave their homes to gamble, which harmed those who have a problematic consumption of the activity, everything is at your fingertips.
With a cell phone you can access all kinds of games, from the most traditional ones such as roulette or poker games, sports betting and even television. It is that at the height of Big Brother, from the same pages that the results of soccer matches were bet, money could also be gambled on whoever abandoned the reality show.
The offer is infinite, as far as football is concerned, it does not only remain in the old prode in which bettors seek to guess the result of the match. There are many more possibilities to win money, you can risk the number of corner kicks that will take place or even the minute in which the goal will be scored.
Hand in hand with this, advertising also grew, ads can be seen on television programs, on soccer jerseys and on influencer accounts that have thousands of followers.
This is also worrying is that many celebrities are shown playing on their Instagram accounts and encourage those who follow them to do so and the public, who trusts them, not only run the risk of establishing a complicated relationship with the game but also of falling into pages that they are not secure.
In recent times, many celebrities began to advertise a virtual casino on networks, for which they do not publish the official page but a WhatsApp link. This is what many former Big Brother participants did, including Coty, who has more than two million followers on Instagram to whom he introduced his “trusted casino”, an action that he repeated on Twitter where he wrote: “Guysss they keep asking me about My trusted casino is Wins Dealers where all of us from GH play. The best thing is that they pay for the real 24 hours. I leave the data so they listen to me and they are going to play now!
Given this, from the Ombudsman’s Office they assured that the regulation of what happens within the networks is a “pending issue”, in which it is difficult to advance due to the fact that the betting and casino pages are companies based abroad with regulatory frameworks different from those of Argentina.
The phenomenon is growing day by day and threatens to become a true scourge, in which young people attracted by the promise of earning large sums of money immerse themselves in this world regardless of age or if they do it with their own money or that of their parents.
booming business
During the pandemic, the number of online bettors and players in the country increased exponentially. Thus, with revenues exceeding 2.4 billion dollars, Argentina leads the growth ranking of the region.
