Pennsylvania Wants to Promote Awareness of Underage Gambling

The Pennsylvania Gaming Control Board (PGCB) has launched a new campaign geared towards raising awareness about underage gambling, which is becoming an increasingly challenging problem for the state and the country as a whole.

Billed “What’s Really at Stake,” the campaign, which has a website by the same name and ends on dot com, shares various promotional materials and highlights key misconceptions about gambling and underage individuals.

New Campaign Addresses Gambling-Related Harm in Young People

Gifting lottery tickets to children has been increasingly popular, drawing criticism from regulators well beyond the Keystone State. In the meantime, the new campaign is launched to coincide with the Problem Gambling Awareness Month in March and the NCAA Men’s Basketball Championship, and comes at the same time that a new bill in Congress is trying to allocate one-third of gambling tax revenue to treatment and boost responsible gambling.

The regulator has highlighted several key statistics about the prevalence of gambling among young people, with 58% of 18-22-year-olds engaged in sports betting and 6% reporting losing more than $500 in a single day. 

Another 75% of college students gambled legally and illegally in the past year, based on a College Gambling dot org survey, and 6% of college students are actually. 

PGCB Executive Director Kevin O’Toole has welcomed the latest move and said that it is an important step forward to strengthening safety:

“The legalized gambling the PGCB regulates, and in particular online, is intended for those 21 years and older. The licensed operators in Pennsylvania have various tools within their systems to deny gambling privileges to those underage, but the proliferation of easily accessible illegal and unregulated sites that do not carry those protections to block underagers is a substantial reason for creating this negative situation.”

Young People Have Been Increasingly Seeking Help

The campaign extends beyond the young people who are most likely to be affected by gambling-related harm, but also to their family and friends. In the meantime, Compulsive Gambling of PA executive director of the council, Josh Ercole, also weighed in on the dialogue, highlighting the fact that more young people are calling in and seeking help. 

“In recent years, calls to the helpline regarding young individuals in Pennsylvania have increased. With so much access and availability, especially in unregulated forms of gambling, it is critical to have open discussions about risks and potential harms,” he added.