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Returning to the virtual casino: a contemporary study of actual online casino gambling

ABSTRACT There is a greater need for contemporary research to empirically examine actual internet casino gambling behavior with valid data. To fill this gap in research, the current study examined two years (1 February 2015 to 31 January 2017) of prospective longitudinal data from 4,424 actual online casino gambling subscribers to one of the E.U.’s largest internet gambling services, including novel analyses of depositing and withdrawal behaviors. We found that today’s online casino gambling behaviors are similar to those observed 10 years ago in the E.U., with similarly small proportions of the player pool exhibiting more extreme gambling involvement than the rest. Some unique gambling behaviors (e.g. net loss), depositing behaviors (e.g. credit card use), and withdrawal behaviors (e.g. reversed withdrawals) distinguished more involved bettors from typical bettors. Our results suggest that, like a decade prior, most online casino players in our sample bet modest amounts and play relatively infrequently, yet a small percentage (approximately 5%) engage at disproportionately high and potentially risky levels. These findings are based on data from a single online casino operator and bettors in our sample might have gambled with other operators during the study period.