Max’s friend group of high school boys in Manhattan throws an annual Super Bowl Party. But this year’s gathering was “a really sad moment,” the 17-year-old told The Post.
“It used to be for the experience, but this year it wasn’t,” said Max (at his parents’ request, his name has been changed). “It was everybody betting [on the game] … the theme of the party was essentially betting.”
That’s when, Max said, he realized sports betting was becoming an addiction among his friends.
“Kids take money out of savings accounts or bar mitzvah accounts for betting,” the senior at a private school in the city said. “I know kids who stay up super late and sacrifice their grades to watch sports across the country, just because they can bet on it.”
Though New Yorkers have to be 18 to place a bet, underage gambling is an emerging epidemic. Some 90% of high school students surveyed by the New York Council on Problem Gambling said they’d gambled at least once in the past year.
FanDuel and DraftKings are the most popular apps of choice at Max’s school. He estimates 80% of the boys in his class have placed a bet and probably 40% gamble regularly — using their parents’ accounts.
Max’s dad opened the FanDuel account using his own Social Security number, date of birth and banking info — verification required by the major betting apps — then turned it over to the 17-year-old.
“We’d be saying, ‘Oh, yeah, it’s not a big deal,’” Max recalled of how he and his friends talked their parents into creating accounts for them. “‘You know, we all have it, and we’re not betting a lot of money.’”
“I said fine. I just didn’t think anything about it. It was something that he and his friends were all doing,” Max’s dad, who works in finance, admitted to The Post.
Max said he’s been “pretty controlled’ with his $5 bets but that many of his friends are “100% addicted.”
“At school, it’s all kids with their gambling apps in class,” he said. “And it never stops because it’s football season, then basketball, then baseball.”
The youngest gambler he knows is just 11 years old.
“I know kids in middle school who are starting to gamble,” Max said. His friends “weren’t even talking about it in freshman year but the younger kids, it’s all they talk about now. It’s crazy.”
Keith Whyte, President of Safer Gambling Strategies, told The Post that teenage boys have the highest rate of participation in online sports betting. According to the group, 5% of kids aged 12-17 have gambling problems — quadruple as many as two years ago.
“The part of their brain that governs risk and reward and decision-making is not fully matured,” Whyte said. “Now that gambling is so accessible and unregulated forms of sports betting are so easily accessible, those two things combine into a sort of toxic cocktail of risk.”
Max’s dad now sees gambling as teen-boy kryptonite: “They all think there’s a level of skill and knowledge that they have. They feel like they have some sophistication and can beat the system, beat the man. It’s the mindset of teenage boys — they feel like, ‘I’m smarter than adults, I can figure this out.’”
He suspects the people behind the apps know this.
“If you get someone when they’re young, it’s almost like a rewiring of their brain,” the dad said. “It’s not by accident that all these teenage boys, who are under 18, are on these apps all the time … It’s clearly part of the [business] strategy, even though [the apps] won’t say it.”
A spokesperson for FanDuel told The Post that customers are forbidden from “allowing other individuals to wager on their account” and that doing so “will result in a permanent ban from our platform.”
They also pointed to their parental portal, Conversations about Betting, which warns of the dangers of underage gambling and addresses why customers should not share accounts.
But sources told The Post that kids who aren’t able to access a family member’s account sometimes use VPNs and cryptocurrency to sign into unregulated or offshore websites.
James, a 17-year-old from New Jersey — where the minimum age to bet is 21 — said it was easy to access a FanDuel account without his parents even knowing, thanks to a family friend. “I was like, ‘Hey, bro, can I use that?’” (James is not his real name.)
Though that was two years ago, the public-school senior’s parents still don’t know he has gambled. He started betting money he made from selling clothes online.
“It was appealing, like, I don’t know, it looks fun, and there’s the huge potential upside to it,” James said, adding that gambling is “incredibly normal” among his friends. “I wasn’t gambling thousands and thousands of dollars, so the risk of what I could lose wasn’t huge.”
After a couple of months, however, a friend showed him the online casino side of FanDuel and, James said, he got hooked fast.
“If you’re betting on an NFL game, it’s three hours. You don’t have that boom, boom, boom, bat, bat, bat experience,” he explained. “Once I moved over to the casino thing, that’s when it became an addiction.”
Over two years, James said, he bet more than $18,000 of his own money and walked away with a net $2,000 loss.
He resolved to quit after realizing his bank statement showed nothing but FanDuel transactions for a straight week: “It became more stressful than fun, and I was doing it every day.”
Attorney Benjamin Schenk, who is representing complainants in an upcoming lawsuit concerning underage online gambling addiction, said he’s seen much worse — including kids who have “been groomed through influencer gambling culture on platforms like Twitch” and “look at gambling as a positive expression of masculinity.”
The lawsuit’s youngest complainant so far is 12.
“I’ve met kids who lost a decent amount of money, got embarrassed, tried to win it back, and then when they lost it again self-harmed,” Schenk added.
Lewis Bigmore, 29, is from the United Kingdom and was just 16 when he made an online bet on the English Football League under his father’s name. He won more than $85,000 (£64,000), which his dad begrudgingly cashed out on the condition that he put it in savings and premium bonds.
But when Bigmore turned 18, the age of majority in the UK, he got access to the money and craved the high of another win. Within three years, he’d blown through all his winnings and was taking out payday loans to stay afloat.
It consumed him to the point that he was avoiding friends and family. “I never spoke to anyone because that was an uncomfortable conversation to have. Like, how do you get addicted to losing money?”
He hasn’t placed a bet since January, his longest “clean streak” yet.
Isaac Rose-Berman, 25, is a professional sports bettor who also speaks to teenage boys about the dangers of his trade.
“When I go in and talk to them, it’s like, ‘Look, I hire PhDs to run my models. You’re not doing that. If you win, it’s just gonna be getting lucky. You’re basically getting fleeced,’” the Brooklynite told The Post.
He sees “a very large number of boys” at the New York City schools he visits who are gambling.
“Kids are watching ESPN and seeing DraftKings ads,” Rose-Berman said. “Every podcast you listen to is sponsored by a betting company, and what that does is normalize the activity.”
A representative for DraftKings said the company uses “advanced Know Your Customer technology — trusted by the financial industry and law enforcement — to verify the age and identity of our customers. Any use of our platform by minors is strictly prohibited, in violation of both our terms of use and applicable law and if unauthorized activity is detected, we close the account.”
Last year, the office of the Massachusetts Attorney General opened an investigation into the harms of youth gambling. And Virginia passed a gambling addiction education bill, signed into law in 2022, which adds instruction on gambling addiction to school curriculum.
Meanwhile, only 2% of American parents think their teen has used an online betting platform, according to a 2024 poll from the University of Michigan.
But Schenk they should open their eyes: “The gulf between what is actually happening among high school students and what parents suspect couldn’t be wider. If you think your kid isn’t engaging in this behavior, really question yourself.”
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