Report
Prohibition of gambling on credit cards
This report focuses on research conducted around the prohibition of gambling on credit cards
Contents
- Executive summary
- Background and approach
- Methodology and limitations
- Operator Implementation and customer behaviour
- Credit cards and digital wallets
- Deposits prior to the introduction of the ban
- Displacement to other high-cost credit sources
- Displacement to illegal sources of funds
- Bypassing the ban through other behaviours
- Displacement to unlicensed gambling sites
- Inconvenience to leisure gamblers
- Conclusions and next steps
- Appendices
Deposits prior to the introduction of the ban
- Metric
- Gamblers don’t make a large credit card deposit prior to the ban’s introduction
- Concern
- In the build-up to the ban’s introduction, gamblers could have made large deposits to their accounts using credit cards which would have reduced the early efficacy of the ban
- Assessment
- We have found no evidence to suggest that large credit card deposits were made prior to the ban’s introduction
A major high street bank has informed us that, amongst those that used a credit card to gamble, there was no identifiable shift in spend behaviour towards ATM withdrawals or money transfers in the build-up to, or subsequent to, the implementation of the credit card gambling ban.
A significant decrease in ATM use was observed during March 2020, which is very likely to have been a consequence of the spread of Covid-19 during that time.
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Prohibition of gambling on credit cards - Displacement to other high-cost credit sources
Last updated: 2 November 2021
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