Gambling Addiction News Coverage
Recent reporting from major outlets on the growing gambling crisis. Each story includes our take on what it means for people in recovery.
51 stories · newest first
AP News
Sorsby Won’t Play for Texas Tech After Unprecedented Legal Fight Over His Eligibility for Gambling
Brendan Sorsby will not play for Texas Tech after all. Weeks after a judge granted a temporary injunction clearing him to take the field, the legal fight over his eligibility collapsed — ending the career of a 22-year-old quarterback whose case laid bare roughly $90,000 in sports wagers and more than 2,900 bets placed over 18 months, some of them while he was still underage. The saga became a high-profile study in how addiction intersects with enablement and institutional response.
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European Gaming
UK Helpline Hits a Five-Year High for Online Gambling Calls — 82% of New Contacts Cite Digital Betting
GamCare’s National Gambling Helpline is reporting its highest demand in five years, with online gambling now driving 82% of new contacts. The surge points to a structural shift in where people lose control — from physical venues to the phone in their pocket — and GamCare warns that major sporting events like the World Cup can trigger acute spikes in the need for crisis support.
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News 5 Cleveland
New Federal Bill Calls for Comprehensive Study on Gambling Addiction Crisis
Reps. Dan Goldman (D-NY) and Blake Moore (R-UT) introduced the bipartisan Gambling Disorder Health Study Act, directing the federal government to undertake a multi-year investigation into the causes, progression, and long-term effects of gambling addiction. No federal agency has tracked sports-betting harms since the 2018 Supreme Court ruling opened the door to legalization. The bill would fund the research with 10% of federal excise-tax revenue from state-approved sports betting and require annual progress reports to Congress.
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The Athletic
Fixing in Sport: With Gambling Arrests in NBA and MLB, What Can the U.S. Learn From Europe's Scars?
The Athletic's eight-month investigation into match-fixing turns to the United States: the federal arrests of Terry Rozier, Chauncey Billups and Damon Jones, the rigged-pitch charges against Cleveland's Emmanuel Clase and Luis Ortiz, and what Europe's decades of integrity scandals can teach a country where legal sports betting now handles over $165 billion a year across 39 states. Five European integrity experts describe a landscape that "has scaled faster than the integrity architecture" — and point to the state-by-state regulatory patchwork as a core vulnerability. Notably, multiple bodies including the UN Office on Drugs and Crime warn that gambling addiction itself is a major risk factor for athlete corruption.
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CNN
Former NY Rep. George Santos Under Investigation for Alleged Insider Trading on Kalshi
Former Rep. George Santos — whose seven-year fraud sentence was commuted last year — is under federal scrutiny for his trading on Kalshi, CNN's Marshall Cohen reports. The prediction platform flagged suspicious activity in a market on whether Santos would attend this year's State of the Union: Santos said publicly he would be there, traders staked millions across the attendance markets, and he ultimately didn't show. Kalshi determined the account was his, froze it, and referred the matter to the Justice Department and the CFTC, which is now investigating. The story lands as prediction markets explode in popularity — regulated like commodity futures, not gambling — and as lawmakers warn the rules haven't caught up with the industry.
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MindSite News
New Report: Online Gambling Puts Youth, Members of the Military and Others at Great Risk of Financial Harm, Addiction and Depression
A new report from the Kindbridge Research Institute and UCLA documents who online gambling is hurting most: young adults, service members and veterans. Since the 2018 Supreme Court decision, sports-betting participation has climbed from 15% to 22% of U.S. adults; nearly 20 million show problematic gambling behavior annually and 2.5 million meet criteria for severe gambling disorder. Adults 18–34 show "concerning gambling behavior" at 15% — versus 2% of those 55 and older — and states that legalized sports betting after 2018 recorded 28% higher personal bankruptcy filings. The report's sharpest point: gambling harm surfaces in clinics, banks and families separately, with no integrated system to catch a crisis before it escalates.
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CNN
“The Ads Got to Me”: College-Age Adults Are Rushing to Prediction Markets, and Addiction Experts Are Alarmed
GAMeetingFinder is cited as a help resource in CNN Business's deep-dive on the prediction-market loophole — and the reporting itself is essential reading. Marshall Cohen and Elisabeth Buchwald follow Andrew, an 18-year-old high school senior who turned a $500 cash advance into a $2,200 profit on Kalshi in six hours at a Starbucks — then spiraled when he tried to withdraw his winnings at 3 a.m. and got an error message. Under current U.S. law, prediction markets aren't classified as gambling: they're “event contracts” regulated like futures on soybean prices, which means 18-year-olds can trade them even though they can't legally use a sportsbook in most states. “Without question, it's a loophole,” former New Jersey Attorney General Matt Platkin told CNN. State regulators and addiction specialists describe an emerging public-health corridor aimed straight at college-age men.
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Gambling Insider
Responsible Gambling Research and Advocacy Orgs: Multiple Groups Addressing Issues Tied to Gambling
Gambling Insider surveys the research and advocacy infrastructure growing up around American gambling expansion: the NCPG under new leadership (and its debated Kalshi partnership), the American Institute for Boys and Men's new gambling-policy program, CASPR's GLP-1 medication pilots and 50-state online-gambling report card, the Kindbridge/UCLA Financial Stability and Responsible Gambling initiative, and McGill's youth-gambling research centre. The standout development is north of the border: Greo, funded through Health Canada's Youth Mental Health Fund, is developing Canada's first clinical practice guidelines for problematic youth gambling — a 24-month project addressing what it calls a total lack of evidence-based clinical guidance for treating young people experiencing gambling harm.
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iGaming Business
Rising Numbers of Younger, Diverse Callers in 2025, Says US National Gambling Helpline
The US National Problem Gambling Helpline's 2025 annual report shows a service straining toward a younger, more digital caller base: more than 31,000 contacts a month across calls, texts and chats, with nearly half now coming from adults 18–34. Online and app-based gambling rose to 31% of caller concerns (from 23% in 2024), overtaking the long decline in slot-machine calls, and over 73% of callers reported gambling-linked financial distress — up from 66% a year earlier. Mental health concerns affect 32% of callers and relationship problems 22%. Younger help-seekers increasingly prefer text and web chat over phone calls, pushing the helpline to expand its digital channels.
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Daily Sabah
Research in Türkiye Links Depression to Severe Gambling Behavior
A peer-reviewed study in Addicta, the journal of Türkiye's Green Crescent (Yeşilay), followed 60 male patients with an average age of 35 and found that the more intense someone's gambling became, the higher their depression levels ran. The most worrying pattern: participants with deeper depression were both more likely to feel unable to stop and less motivated to seek treatment — a feedback loop that traps people exactly when they most need help. Fully 68.3% of the patients had at least one co-occurring psychiatric disorder, and 35% met criteria for depression. “Gambling disorders are often discussed only in terms of financial losses,” said editor-in-chief Hakan Coşkunol — “our research shows there is a very strong mental health dimension.” For clinicians, it is a reminder to screen for dual diagnosis rather than treating the gambling in isolation.
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AboutLawsuits.com
Sports Betting Addiction Lawsuits Allege Platforms Failed to Warn of Addictive Design
A growing wave of class-action lawsuits accuses betting platforms of engineering addiction and then failing to warn the people most at risk. The lead case, filed May 11, 2026 in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Kentucky, names prediction-market operator Kalshi and trading giant Susquehanna, alleging they run an unlicensed sports-wagering business dressed up as a “prediction market.” Related suits against FanDuel, DraftKings, and Caesars make a broader claim: that the products are deliberately built to be addictive — 24/7 access, deceptive promotions, and algorithms that target addiction-prone users — while marketing aggressively to young adults and disclosing none of the risk. The plaintiff's complaint puts it bluntly: Kalshi “believes that it is above Kentucky law.” However the cases resolve, they signal that “failure to warn” is becoming the legal frontier for an industry that has so far policed itself.
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The New Republic
What Sports Gambling Is Learning From Big Tobacco
Journalist Danny Funt traces how the sports-betting industry is borrowing Big Tobacco's oldest move: co-opting the very experts the public trusts to warn them. The centerpiece is Keith Whyte, who ran the National Council on Problem Gambling for decades — warning Congress in 2019 of a “Frankenstein's monster of advertising, access, and action” — and now consults for the industry-funded Sports Betting Alliance, reportedly for $20,000 a month. Funt reports that roughly 20% of NCPG's funding comes from gambling companies, including about $2 million tied to the NFL, even as Americans have legally wagered more than $650 billion since the 2018 Supreme Court ruling, and nearly half of all bettors say they feel ashamed after losing. The piece argues that when the safety experts are on the industry payroll, regulation stalls — exactly the strategy that kept cigarettes unchallenged for decades.
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Gambling Harm
Kalshi's Troubling $2M 'Investment' In Gambling Addiction PR
A prediction-market platform funding addiction awareness messaging raises conflict-of-interest concerns that recovery communities should understand when evaluating harm-reduction claims in the space.
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Bright Side of News
Problem Gambling Treatment Funding Gap Widens
2.5 million American adults meet clinical criteria for gambling disorder but receive only ~$78 per person per year in treatment funding — barely one therapy session — exposing a critical access crisis our members face.
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Better Markets
When the Supreme Court Said Sports Betting Could Be Legalized, It Left the Issue to the States, Not the CFTC
Eight years after legalization, the regulatory fragmentation across states has fueled a nationwide epidemic of sports betting addiction with minimal federal guardrails.
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Baptist Health
Gambling Addiction: Growing Mental Health Concern Fueled by Online Betting, Prediction Markets
Confirms that gambling addiction is treatable through therapy, support groups, and medication — clinically grounded hope for members in early recovery.
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The Globe and Mail
When sports betting becomes a problem
Ben Kaplan rounds up the post-legalization Canadian numbers and they're rough. Ontario alone took $82.7 billion in online wagers in 2024–25, a 32% year-over-year jump. Calls to the provincial addictions helpline from males 15–24 climbed more than 300%. Among online gamblers aged 18–29, 69.4% met the clinical criteria for problem gambling. CAMH and Gamblers Anonymous Toronto are quoted.
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AARP
Many Older Americans Are Drawn to Online Gambling as Industry Booms
AARP's John Rosengren reports on what helpline data is now showing — gambling problems are concentrating in adults over 50, not just the young men who dominate most coverage. In Connecticut, 1 in 9 helpline calls is from someone 55+. In Nevada, it's 1 in 3 from age 50+. At the Dr. Robert Hunter clinic in Las Vegas, 35–40% of clients are over 50.
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Robert King Law Firm
DraftKings Gambling Lawsuit [2026 Update]
A practitioner-side primer on the active class-action and individual litigation against DraftKings. Cases pled in Pennsylvania, Michigan, California, New Jersey, and federal court allege addictive product design, ignored self-exclusion requests, deceptive 'risk-free' bonus structures, and personalized targeting of identified problem gamblers using internal user data. Connecticut already settled with DCP for $3 million in refunds to 7,000 consumers (July 2025).
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Slate
I've Researched and Written About Addiction for Years. I Had a Big Reaction to The Atlantic's Viral Gambling Story.
A Slate columnist who is herself in recovery takes The Atlantic to task for funding a $10,000 gambling experiment by one of its writers — calling it a publication that prioritized virality over the wellbeing of someone they were watching slip into addiction in real time.
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Times of San Diego
Prediction markets say they're different from sportsbooks. Gambling addicts say it's all the same
Prediction-market companies argue their platforms are fundamentally different from sportsbooks — peer-to-peer trading, regulated as financial markets, not gambling. Addiction specialists report seeing identical compulsive-gambling cycles in patients regardless of which platform they used.
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Colorado Springs Gazette
Gambling addiction issue could affect thousands of college athletes
Texas Tech quarterback Brendan Sorsby — coming off an $875,000 NIL deal — has stepped away from football to seek treatment for gambling addiction. The story behind the headline: an estimated thousands of male college athletes are dealing with the same compulsive-gambling pattern, and the demographic profile of a college quarterback is almost a textbook risk profile.
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Health Benefits Times
How to Overcome Gambling Addiction
A clear, evidence-based primer on the recovery options that actually have research behind them — CBT, peer support groups, self-exclusion, and mindfulness-based approaches — written for people who don’t yet know where to start.
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The Washington Post
Senators ban themselves from participating in prediction markets
The Senate just voted to bar its own members and staff from participating in prediction markets — an unusual self-imposed guardrail that arrives while the regulatory authority over those same markets is still being fought over in court.
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Bright Side of News
Gambling self-exclusion fragmentation leaves US problem bettors exposed across 39 legal states
Self-exclusion lists work — until you cross a state line. With 39 states now running their own legal gambling markets and no federal database tying them together, a self-excluded bettor in one state can drive 40 minutes and bet legally in the next.
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NY Governor's Office
Governor Hochul announces 10-year statewide effort to assess gambling addiction and behaviors
New York is launching a decade-long survey to track how gambling behavior and addiction are changing across the state — a public-health framing that’s still rare in a country where gambling expansion is mostly covered as a tax-revenue story.
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ESPN
Texas Tech QB Brendan Sorsby enters residential treatment for gambling addiction
Texas Tech quarterback Brendan Sorsby is taking an indefinite leave from the program to enter inpatient treatment for gambling addiction, sources told ESPN's Pete Thamel. The 21-year-old, on a $5M+ NIL deal after transferring from Cincinnati, was reportedly under NCAA investigation for thousands of online sports bets via a gambling app, including wagers on Indiana football games during his 2022 freshman season. Texas Tech head coach Joey McGuire: "We love Brendan and support his decision to seek professional help."
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PYMNTS.com
CFTC Sues New York Over Authority in Prediction Market Regulation
The CFTC is suing New York over who can regulate prediction markets — the latest skirmish in a regulatory turf war that, whoever wins, ratifies a business model that turns every news event into another opportunity to bet.
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Gambling Harm
'Nightmare' Allegations Against Michael Jordan-Backed Online Gambling Firm
A look at fresh allegations that Sportradar — a major data provider behind US legal sportsbooks and backed by Michael Jordan — quietly served illegal offshore gambling operators, and what that means for the integrity of the regulated online-gambling market.
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Business Insider
Online Betting Is Fueling a Wave of Bankruptcies Among Young Americans
Bankruptcy lawyers are seeing more young clients buried in credit card debt as sports-betting apps boom — the financial wreckage from the legal-sports-betting era is now showing up in court filings, not just clinical research.
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International Business Times
U.S. Soldier Charged for Allegedly Making Hundreds of Thousands in Polymarket Bet Tied to Maduro Operation
A Special Forces master sergeant turned $33,000 into roughly $409,000 on Polymarket by allegedly betting on the outcome of a classified Venezuela operation he had inside knowledge of. He now faces wire fraud, commodities fraud, theft of government property, and unlawful monetary transaction charges — and the case is becoming the cleanest example yet that prediction markets are gambling, not "information markets," and that nobody is actually policing them.
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The Guardian
US gambling addiction is 'out of control' as betting markets boom, policy expert warns
Leading policy voices are now sounding the alarm publicly—this mainstream coverage validates what GA members already know and signals momentum toward regulation that could reshape the industry landscape.
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WalletHub
States Most Addicted to Gambling (2026)
A 20-metric ranking of all 50 states + DC on gambling-friendliness (casino density, machine counts, iGaming, sports betting, lottery sales) and gambling problem/treatment (adult disorder prevalence, counselor density, GA meetings, arrests). Top 5: Nevada, South Dakota, Montana, Mississippi, Louisiana. Bottom 5: Utah, Vermont, Alaska, Kansas, Hawaii.
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NPR
The surprising origin of the features that superglue kids & adults to screens
Reporting on the gambling-industry design techniques — variable reward schedules, near-miss mechanics, intermittent reinforcement, and dopamine loops originally engineered for slot machines — that were ported into the consumer apps kids and adults use every day.
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Yahoo! News
For first time, federal funding is available to study gambling addiction
For the first time, a new defense appropriations package permits gambling disorder research through the Department of Defense's Peer Reviewed Medical Research Program — acknowledging the high prevalence of gambling problems and suicide risk among active military and veterans. Also covers the bipartisan Points Act moving through Congress.
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The New York Times
'It's on the App': A Police Chief's $4.5 Million Gambling Secret
New Haven's police chief, Karl Jacobson, resigned abruptly after his deputies saw red flags, including missing money. He has pleaded not guilty to embezzling city money to gamble on sports.
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NPR
As gaming's popularity rises, here's how parents can talk to kids about gambling
Expert guidance for parents navigating conversations with children about gambling as gaming culture increasingly normalizes betting mechanics and loot-box economies.
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NPR
More teens are getting hooked on gambling. Parents say it often goes undetected
A national survey from Common Sense Media found that 36% of boys age 11-17 in the U.S. have gambled in the past year. The explosion of online sports betting and its advertising is drawing in a growing number of young people.
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NPR
After states legalize sports betting, Americans see financial strain, studies show
States that allowed online betting saw a 10% increase in the likelihood of bankruptcy and an 8% increase in debt collection amounts — outcomes that appear about two years after legalization. The NY Federal Reserve links sports betting to plummeting credit scores.
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The Washington Post
Virginia's gambling expansion must be matched by recovery support
An editorial arguing that states expanding gambling access must invest equally in treatment and recovery infrastructure for those harmed by the industry.
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The Washington Post
Ole Miss announces college gambling center as concerns rise over addiction, athletes
The University of Mississippi launches the first-of-its-kind Center on Collegiate Gambling amid rising national concern about betting on collegiate sports.
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NPR
Gen Z's relationship with gambling and the unique vulnerabilities it faces
Explores how Gen Z's digital-native upbringing creates unique vulnerability to gambling products designed for constant engagement, micro-bets, and social media integration.
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CNN
How the NFL is betting big on gambling
Investigates the NFL's deepening financial ties to the sports betting industry and how micro-betting features are designed to maximize engagement during games.
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NPR
This reporter went bust while covering America's sports betting boom
A first-person account from a journalist who developed a gambling problem while reporting on the industry — Americans wagered more than $166 billion on sports in 2025.
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NPR Fresh Air
Inside the explosive growth of sports betting
A deep dive into the industry's explosive growth since the 2018 Supreme Court decision, examining how sportsbooks spend billions courting the next generation of bettors.
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Fox News
Lawmaker opens up on emotional reason she wants to fight gambling addiction
Rep. Erin Houchin (R-Ind.) discusses her new bipartisan legislation aimed at helping individuals receive treatment for gambling addiction, drawing from her own family's experience with the issue.
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NPR
The rising cost of online betting addiction among young people
Massachusetts gambling hotline referrals for people in their 20s and 30s have more than doubled since the state legalized sports betting in 2023, with nearly 400 referred for treatment in fiscal year 2024.
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CNN
Why experts are sounding the alarm about young men and sports betting
Live, in-game micro-bets are among the most lucrative for sportsbooks and potentially the most addictive — dopamine hits available every minute rather than once per game.
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CNN
'They ruined that for me': How sports gambling addiction and recovery affects men's bonds
Over 100 young men who self-identified as 'sports gambling sober' describe how addiction eroded relationships with friends, family, and fandom before recovery.
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NPR
'Everybody Loses' chronicles the rise of America's sports betting boom
Review of Danny Funt's book chronicling the human cost of America's sports betting explosion and the industry tactics that fuel addiction.
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The Washington Post
Inside a sports betting addiction recovery center
A look inside Right Choice Recovery in Dayton, New Jersey — a treatment center with gambling-specific sober houses where residents work to maintain sobriety from sports betting.
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