Thousands of student gambling addicts ‘spending £30 a week on habit’

theguardian.com:

Thousands of student gambling addicts are spending an average of £30 a week on betting, racking up debts and missing out on university life to fund their habit, research has found.

In a survey of 2,000 students, 80% said they gambled, with 35% of those who did admitting using their student loan, bank overdrafts, borrowing from friends or taking out payday loans.

Of those who gambled, 41% said it had led to them missing lectures, assignment deadlines or social activities.

There are about 2.5 million students in the UK, indicating that hundreds of thousands are suffering financial or social harm due to gambling.

Students reported spending £31.52 on betting in a week on average, while almost 20% admitted to spending more than £50. They were asked how much they spent on gambling, without a distinction being made between deposits and losses.

The most popular product was the National Lottery (32%), including casino-style instant win smartphone games, followed by online sports betting (25%) and online bingo (18%).

The report, by the YGAM youth gambling charity and Gamstop, the national tool for gamblers who want to bar themselves from online betting and gaming, built on previous research that found that 88,000 students have a problem.

Martin Jones’ son, Josh, took his own life in 2015 after becoming addicted to gambling while doing his A-levels and later getting into financial difficulty at university.

“He went up to halls of residence and within 10 days he’d blown his first term’s loan, which was about £1,200,” said Jones.

Jones and his wife, Kim, ended up having to manage their son’s finances for the duration of his time studying maths at the University of Surrey.

He got a job with the accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers shortly