Being that gambling is an ever-growing industry and entertainment activity, it’s just normal that some players do get addicted to gambling or have gambling problems.
Gambling: Self-Exclusion
On the other hand, no industry grows as big as the gambling industry did without being socially responsible and following the law, which wants that their citizens to be protected.
It’s in this context that self-exclusion laws and procedures appear, to protect the gambling players who just had too much fun, and from a certain point on that fun turned into addiction.
Self-Exclusion – The Option
In the UK there are over 23 million gamblers, and from these 6% decided to self-exclude. The simple existence of this option is not only a help for the players with problems, but it’s also a way for the country to tackle the gambling addiction problem and for the gambling industry to improve their image, as a sector concerned with the health and well-being of their players.
The dilemma gambling companies might have by giving this opt out option to some of their best clients and source of income is reduced by the existing heavy penalty packages, which can reach millions, far more than the income that any player could give.
More, online casinos are currently distributing marketing material in this sense, making the gambling sector both self-responsible and transparent. The recent heavy fines have made the industry more responsible and now this option is real and properly controlled, as determined by law.
Protection To Vulnerable Customers
Not only the fines are strong incentives to protect those with gambling problems, but also the loss of licensing is also possible by law.
At the same time, the player still has to ban himself individually in each type of gambling, as there isn’t a unique platform to do it. For example, if one wants to be excluded from Bingo it must go to the Bingo Association, from Online Gambling to the responsible entity, physical casinos is another different entity, and so on.
As an answer to this situation, self-exclusion software has been developed in order to provide more effective means of prevention to problem gambling. One of these software is Gamban, which enables their users to block online gambling sites from several operators and gaming types.
A More Solid Answer
The strength of Gamban is to prevent the problem gamblers to bypass their own self-exclusion, by creating new accounts, for example. The same situation happens when the player blocks himself from a certain gambling platform, but he/she can easily register at a new gambling site, even more when so many bonuses are offered across the board.
Naturally that the self-exclusion responsibility is still from the individual side, but it’s a responsibility as well from the regulator to provide the necessary tools, and private companies and software developers also have an interest in taking a piece of this new business.
Centralized processes of self-exclusion are already starting to appear and will be even more common in the future. This is a strong necessity as it’s proven by the 280 online gambling
organizations, just in the UK, some of them with several sites, which used to require independent self-exclusion requests, something that makes no sense to protect the player with gambling problems and that is currently being addressed.
