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.
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