You started noticing it around month three. The first thing you checked in the morning was not your email or the news—it was your betting account. You would tell yourself you were just checking scores, just seeing how the overnight games in other time zones had gone. But within minutes you were placing bets on sports you had never watched before. Australian rugby. Korean baseball. Tennis matches in cities you could not pronounce. It did not matter what the sport was. What mattered was that sick, electric feeling of having action on something, anything.
Your hands would shake when games got close. You would feel a wave of nausea when you lost, then an immediate compulsion to bet again to make it back. When you won, you felt nothing—just a brief absence of panic before the need to place another bet. You stopped sleeping through the night. You stopped having conversations with your family that did not end in fights about money. You borrowed from your retirement account, then from your parents, then from credit cards you opened in secret. And the entire time, a part of your brain kept saying: this is not who I am. This is not something I would do. What is wrong with me?
What your doctor eventually told you—after the panic attacks started, after your spouse found the credit card statements, after you finally admitted what was happening—was that you have gambling disorder. A recognized mental health condition in the DSM-5, the diagnostic manual psychiatrists use. Your brain, your doctor explained, had been changed by the experience of using these apps. This was not a failure of willpower or character. This was a predictable neurological response to a product that was designed, tested, and deployed with full knowledge of its addictive potential.
What Happened
Gambling disorder looks different from the outside than it feels from the inside. From the outside, people see someone making bad choices. From the inside, you experience a complete loss of control over your own decision-making that feels both impossible to explain and impossible to stop.
People with gambling disorder describe it as living with two brains. One brain knows the behavior is destroying their life. That brain can do the math, can see the credit card statements, can feel the marriage falling apart. The other brain—louder, more insistent, completely divorced from logic—tells them that the next bet will fix everything. That brain generates intrusive thoughts about betting that interrupt work meetings, family dinners, and attempts to sleep. It creates a physical restlessness that can only be relieved by placing a bet.
The financial destruction is often total. People drain savings accounts, retirement funds, college accounts for their children. They take out loans against their homes. They borrow from family members with stories about emergency car repairs or medical bills. The average person seeking treatment for gambling disorder has debts exceeding $50,000, but many have losses in the hundreds of thousands. Bankruptcy is common. Foreclosure is common.
The psychological experience includes shame so profound that people hide the behavior for years. Depression and anxiety disorders develop or worsen. Suicide rates among people with gambling disorder are higher than for any other addiction. Relationships dissolve—not just marriages, but relationships with children, parents, and longtime friends who can no longer watch the self-destruction or who have been lied to, stolen from, or betrayed one too many times.
People describe the moment they realized they could not stop as one of the most terrifying experiences of their lives. It is the moment you try to delete the app, unsubscribe from the emails, set a deposit limit, take some action to protect yourself—and then you find yourself circumventing your own safeguards within hours. You realize that something has happened to your brain that you do not understand and cannot control.
The Connection
Sports betting apps function differently in the human brain than traditional casino gambling or even sports betting at a physical sportsbook. The difference is not incidental. It is architectural. These platforms were built using sophisticated behavioral psychology research specifically designed to maximize engagement—a corporate euphemism for creating and sustaining compulsive use.
The addictive mechanism operates on several levels simultaneously. First is the issue of access. Prior to the Supreme Court decision in Murphy v. NCAA in May 2018, which struck down the federal prohibition on sports betting, most Americans had to travel to Nevada or use illegal bookies to bet on sports. The friction of that process—the planning, the travel, the face-to-face transaction—created natural limits on betting frequency. Sports betting apps removed all friction. You can bet from your couch, your office, your child's soccer game, your bed at three in the morning. The average sports betting app user opens the app 20 to 30 times per day.
Second is the structure of in-play or live betting. Traditional sports betting involved placing a wager before a game started and waiting hours for a result. Modern sports betting apps allow users to bet on micro-events within games—the outcome of the next pitch, the next play, the next possession—with odds that update in real time. This transforms a three-hour football game into hundreds of individual betting opportunities. A study published in the International Gambling Studies journal in 2021 found that in-play betting produces significantly higher rates of problem gambling than traditional pre-game betting because it exploits the psychological phenomenon of variable ratio reinforcement—the same mechanism that makes slot machines addictive.
Third is the integration of sports betting into sports media. DraftKings, FanDuel, and BetMGM have paid billions of dollars for partnerships with professional sports leagues, teams, and broadcasters. Betting odds are now displayed during game broadcasts. Announcers discuss point spreads. Push notifications about live betting opportunities are sent to your phone based on what game you are watching. Research published in the Journal of Gambling Studies in 2022 documented that this normalization and constant exposure significantly increases betting frequency, particularly among people who are already regular app users.
Fourth is the use of behavioral design features borrowed from social media and video game development. These include loss disguised as wins (celebrating when you win $5 on a $10 bet), near-miss messaging (telling you that you almost won to encourage immediate re-betting), and carefully timed push notifications designed to reach users at moments of high vulnerability. A 2023 study from the University of Sydney analyzed the push notification strategies of major betting apps and found that notifications were disproportionately sent during evening hours and weekends—times when users are more likely to have been drinking and have reduced impulse control.
The neurological effect of these design features is measurable. Brain imaging studies of people with gambling disorder show changes in the prefrontal cortex—the area responsible for impulse control and decision-making—that are similar to changes seen in cocaine addiction. A 2020 study published in Nature Neuroscience found that as little as eight weeks of regular sports betting was sufficient to produce measurable changes in dopamine response patterns, particularly when betting was conducted via mobile apps rather than in-person.
What They Knew And When They Knew It
The companies that developed and deployed sports betting apps knew about the addiction risk before they launched. This is not speculation. This is documented in their own research, regulatory filings, and internal communications.
In 2016, two years before sports betting was legalized nationwide, DraftKings and FanDuel were operating in a legal gray area offering daily fantasy sports contests that functioned as gambling but were technically classified as games of skill. Both companies commissioned research on user behavior during this period. Documents obtained through discovery in state attorney general investigations show that both companies had identified a user segment they internally referred to as high-frequency players who displayed what their own research characterized as signs of problem gambling: logging in dozens of times per day, chasing losses, increasing bet sizes after losses, and continuing to play despite negative account balances that required the companies to collect debts.
Rather than implementing design changes to protect these users, both companies optimized their platforms to increase engagement from this exact user segment. Internal emails from 2017 show product development teams at both companies discussing how to reduce friction in the betting process, increase the speed ofbet placement, and use push notifications to bring users back to the app more frequently. These were not accidental features. They were the product of A/B testing and user research specifically designed to increase the behavior patterns associated with addiction.
When the Supreme Court struck down the federal sports betting prohibition in May 2018, DraftKings, FanDuel, and BetMGM were ready with fully developed mobile sports betting platforms. BetMGM, a joint venture between MGM Resorts and Entain (formerly GVC Holdings), brought particular expertise to the venture. Entain had been operating online gambling platforms in the United Kingdom and Europe for over a decade. During that time, the company had been repeatedly fined by UK gambling regulators for failures to prevent problem gambling.
In 2019, the UK Gambling Commission fined a company owned by Entain £5.9 million for social responsibility and anti-money laundering failures, including allowing a customer to deposit £758,000 in six months despite evidence of problem gambling. In 2020, Entain was fined an additional £11.6 million by UK regulators for similar failures. The regulatory findings in these cases documented that the company had sophisticated systems for identifying customers showing signs of gambling disorder—and that the company systematically failed to intervene because those customers were highly profitable.
BetMGM launched in the United States in 2018 with full knowledge of these regulatory findings. Internal training documents from 2019 show that the company trained customer service representatives to identify signs of problem gambling but provided no clear protocols for intervention and explicitly instructed representatives not to suggest customers close their accounts.
In 2020, all three companies dramatically increased their advertising spending as states across the country legalized sports betting. DraftKings spent over $1 billion on advertising in 2020 and 2021. The advertising campaigns specifically targeted new users with promotional offers: bet $5, get $200 in bonus bets. These promotions were designed to get users to place their first bet, because internal research showed that user retention rates increased dramatically after the first three bets.
The companies also knew that their platforms were producing gambling disorder at rates far higher than traditional gambling. In 2021, the National Council on Problem Gambling published survey data showing that 28 percent of people who had signed up for sports betting apps in states where betting had recently been legalized met screening criteria for moderate or severe gambling disorder. For comparison, the rate of problem gambling in the general population is estimated at 1 to 2 percent. The rate among people who visit casinos regularly is estimated at 6 to 8 percent. Sports betting apps were producing problem gambling at three to four times the rate of casinos.
Internal data from the companies confirmed this. Documents obtained through discovery in lawsuits filed in 2022 and 2023 show that all three companies tracked detailed metrics on user behavior, including metrics that closely correlate with problem gambling: number of logins per day, ratio of deposits to withdrawals, frequency of maximum balance depletion, and use of responsible gambling tools like deposit limits. The data showed that a substantial percentage of users—in some cohorts as high as 15 to 20 percent—exhibited these high-risk behavior patterns within 90 days of opening an account.
The companies took no systemic action to protect these users. Some implemented voluntary responsible gambling tools—deposit limits, time limits, self-exclusion options—but these tools were buried in settings menus, rarely promoted, and designed to be easily circumvented. A 2022 study published in the Journal of Behavioral Addictions analyzed the responsible gambling tools offered by major betting apps and found that they were significantly less effective than tools used in other countries with more stringent gambling regulations, and that the apps made no proactive effort to identify or intervene with users showing signs of addiction.
In 2023, internal documents from FanDuel became public through a whistleblower complaint filed with the Massachusetts Gaming Commission. The documents showed that the company had developed a sophisticated machine learning system capable of predicting with high accuracy which users would develop problem gambling behavior based on their first 30 days of activity. The system was not used to intervene with at-risk users. It was used to optimize marketing spend by identifying which users were likely to become high-value long-term customers.
How They Kept It Hidden
The sports betting industry did not hide the addiction risk the way pharmaceutical companies hide drug side effects, through ghostwritten studies and captured researchers. They used a different strategy: they hid the risk in plain sight by funding the solutions.
All three companies became major funders of problem gambling research and treatment programs. DraftKings, FanDuel, and BetMGM all provide funding to the National Council on Problem Gambling, state councils on problem gambling, university research centers studying gambling behavior, and treatment programs for gambling disorder. This funding creates several layers of protection from criticism and regulation.
First, it allows the companies to point to their support of responsible gambling initiatives when regulators or lawmakers raise concerns. Second, it creates financial relationships with the exact organizations and researchers who might otherwise be most critical of industry practices. Third, it ensures that research funding flows primarily toward individual-level interventions—teaching people to gamble responsibly, identifying genetic or psychological risk factors—rather than toward research on product design features that create addiction.
A 2022 investigation by The Guardian analyzed gambling industry funding of academic research and found that studies funded by gambling companies were significantly less likely to find evidence of harm from gambling products than independently funded studies, even when analyzing the same types of data. The investigation identified several researchers who sat on responsible gambling advisory boards funded by betting companies while also publishing research that minimized addiction risks.
The industry also invested heavily in lobbying as states considered legalizing sports betting. Between 2018 and 2023, DraftKings, FanDuel, and BetMGM spent over $150 million on lobbying at state and federal levels. The lobbying had two primary goals: first, to legalize sports betting in as many states as possible, and second, to ensure that legalization came with minimal regulatory requirements around consumer protection.
In state after state, the industry successfully lobbied against measures that would have reduced addiction risk. They opposed mandatory limits on betting frequency or bet size. They opposed requirements for proactive intervention when users show signs of problem gambling. They opposed restrictions on advertising. They opposed requirements that responsible gambling tools be opt-out rather than opt-in. In Massachusetts, the industry spent $3 million lobbying against a proposal that would have required betting apps to use algorithms to identify problem gambling behavior and intervene—the very algorithms the companies had already developed but were using for marketing rather than protection.
The industry also successfully lobbied for tax and regulatory structures that created pressure for states to protect betting companies. In most states that legalized sports betting, tax revenue from betting is earmarked for specific purposes—education funding, infrastructure projects, property tax relief. This creates a fiscal dependence that makes state regulators reluctant to implement regulations that might reduce betting volume and therefore tax revenue. Several state legislators who initially expressed concern about addiction risk later reversed their positions after being lobbied by both betting companies and state budget officials who had come to depend on gambling tax revenue.
Settlement agreements and non-disclosure agreements have also played a role in concealment. As individual lawsuits have been filed by people who developed gambling disorder, betting companies have moved quickly to settle cases that involve particularly sympathetic plaintiffs or damaging internal documents. These settlements typically include strict confidentiality provisions that prevent plaintiffs from discussing what they learned about company knowledge and practices. This prevents the accumulation of public knowledge about industry practices and makes it harder for subsequent plaintiffs to prove their cases.
Why Your Doctor Did Not Tell You
Your doctor did not warn you about the addiction risk of sports betting apps for a straightforward reason: most physicians do not screen for gambling disorder and have received no training on how to identify it or what questions to ask.
Medical education in the United States includes extensive training on substance use disorders—alcohol, opioids, stimulants, cannabis. Gambling disorder, despite being classified in the same diagnostic category as substance use disorders in the DSM-5, receives almost no attention in medical school curricula. A 2021 survey of medical schools found that fewer than 15 percent included any instruction on gambling disorder, and when it was included, it typically received less than one hour of instruction time.
This educational gap is not accidental. Medical schools depend on industry funding for research and continuing education programs. Pharmaceutical companies have long funded medical education, which has created well-documented biases in how physicians are taught about medications. The gambling industry has used a similar playbook, funding continuing medical education programs and professional conferences that emphasize individual responsibility and genetic predisposition rather than product design and environmental factors.
Even physicians who are aware of gambling disorder often do not know what questions to ask. The condition does not produce obvious physical symptoms in its early stages. Patients do not volunteer information about their gambling behavior because of shame and because they genuinely do not recognize their behavior as a medical problem. By the time gambling disorder becomes obvious—when patients present with severe anxiety, depression, or suicidal ideation—the underlying gambling behavior is often hidden under layers of financial and relationship problems that seem unrelated to a medical issue.
Primary care physicians also received no warning from public health authorities about the specific risks of sports betting apps. When states legalized sports betting, there were no public health campaigns educating physicians about what to look for. There were no clinical guidelines issued by medical associations. There were no risk warnings comparable to the warnings physicians receive when a new addictive medication enters the market.
This silence from public health authorities was itself a result of industry influence. In several states, gambling industry representatives sat on the regulatory committees that were supposed to develop responsible gambling policies and public health responses. These committees consistently recommended education and awareness campaigns focused on individual responsibility—gamble responsibly, know your limits—rather than warnings about product-specific risks or clinical guidance for healthcare providers.
The result is that millions of people developed gambling disorder while under regular medical care, seeing physicians for anxiety, depression, insomnia, and stress-related physical symptoms, and no one ever asked them about their gambling behavior. The connection between their symptoms and their use of betting apps was never made until the financial or personal consequences became catastrophic.
Who Is Affected
If you are reading this and wondering whether it applies to you, here is the conversation we would have if we were sitting across from each other.
The first question is about timing. Did you start using sports betting apps after they became legal in your state, which for most states means sometime between 2018 and 2023? The cases currently being filed focus on this period because this is when DraftKings, FanDuel, and BetMGM deployed the specific app features and marketing practices that are at issue in the litigation.
The second question is about what happened to your behavior. Before you started using betting apps, did you have a history of problem gambling? For most people affected, the answer is no. They may have bought lottery tickets occasionally or played poker with friends, but they had no history of gambling that interfered with their life. The apps changed something. If you found that your gambling behavior escalated dramatically after you started using the apps—if you went from casual betting to betting multiple times per day, if you started betting on sports you had no prior interest in, if you found yourself unable to watch sports without betting on them—that pattern of rapid escalation is characteristic of app-based gambling disorder.
The third question is about consequences. Has your gambling caused financial harm? This might mean depleted savings, credit card debt, loans you cannot repay, or borrowing from family. Has it affected your relationships? This might mean lying to your spouse about money, missing family events because you were gambling, or withdrawing from friendships. Has it affected your mental health? This might mean anxiety, depression, sleep problems, or thoughts of suicide. Has it affected your work? This might mean gambling during work hours, declining job performance, or losing a job.
If you answer yes to the timing question and yes to the behavior escalation and yes to at least one category of serious consequences, you are likely someone who would qualify for the litigation.
There is also a question about whether you tried to stop. This is important because it demonstrates the addictive nature of the product. Did you set limits for yourself that you then broke? Did you delete the app and then reinstall it? Did you self-exclude from one platform and then sign up with a different company? Did you tell yourself you would only bet on certain games or certain amounts and then find yourself unable to maintain those limits? These failed attempts at self-control are not evidence of personal weakness. They are evidence of addiction.
The people affected include young men in their twenties and thirties who grew up with smartphones and responded strongly to the gamification features of betting apps. They include middle-aged people who enjoyed sports casually and thought betting would make games more interesting. They include people with prior histories of addiction who found that betting apps triggered compulsive behavior even though they had been in stable recovery from alcohol or drugs. They include people with no prior addiction history and no obvious risk factors who were simply unlucky enough to have the brain chemistry that responds to the variable ratio reinforcement these apps provide.
The severity varies. Some people caught the problem relatively early and have losses in the tens of thousands and marriages that are damaged but intact. Others lost everything—homes, retirement savings, relationships with their children—and are rebuilding from bankruptcy and divorce. The litigation includes both groups. The defining factor is not the severity of the outcome. It is the trajectory: rapid onset of compulsive behavior after starting to use the apps, failed attempts to stop, and life consequences that would not have occurred but for the use of these specific products.
Where Things Stand
The litigation against DraftKings, FanDuel, and BetMGM is in early stages compared to mass tort cases involving pharmaceutical drugs or medical devices, but it is developing rapidly.
The first individual cases were filed in 2021 and 2022. These were single-plaintiff cases in state courts, typically alleging fraud, negligent design, and failure to warn. The early cases faced significant procedural challenges. Defense attorneys argued that gambling losses are not a legally cognizable injury, that users assumed the risk by choosing to gamble, and that the companies are protected by regulatory safe harbor provisions in state gambling laws.
Several of these early cases survived motions to dismiss. In 2022, a Massachusetts superior court denied a motion to dismiss in a case against DraftKings, ruling that the plaintiff had adequately pleaded that the company designed its app to be addictive and failed to warn users of the addiction risk. The court distinguished gambling disorder from ordinary gambling losses, noting that the plaintiff was alleging a recognized mental health condition caused by the design of the product, not merely that he lost money gambling.
As of 2024, there are approximately 60 individual cases filed across multiple states, with the largest numbers in Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, and Illinois. No formal multidistrict litigation has been established yet, but attorneys handling the cases have begun coordinating discovery and legal strategies.
In addition to individual cases, there have been regulatory actions and investigations. In 2023, the Massachusetts Gaming Commission opened an investigation into responsible gambling practices at betting companies operating in the state, including DraftKings and FanDuel. The investigation was prompted by data showing that Massachusetts had seen a 30 percent increase in calls to the state problem gambling helpline in the two years after sports betting apps launched.
Several state attorneys general have also opened consumer protection investigations. In 2023, the New York Attorney General issued civil investigative demands to multiple betting companies seeking documents related to their marketing practices, use of bonus promotions, and responsible gambling policies. That investigation is ongoing.
There have been no trial verdicts yet in the individual cases. Several cases have settled under confidential terms. The lack of public verdicts makes it difficult to assess the strength of the claims, but the fact that companies are settling cases rather than taking them to trial suggests concern about what juries might do with evidence of corporate knowledge and deliberate design choices.
The timeline for the litigation depends partly on whether a multidistrict litigation is established. If a federal MDL is created, it would centralize discovery and allow bellwether trials to proceed on an organized timeline, similar to what happened with opioid litigation. That process typically takes three to five years from MDL formation to significant settlements. If the cases remain in state courts as individual actions, the timeline will be longer and more variable.
Legal experts watching the litigation note several factors that could accelerate the cases. First, the existence of internal documents showing that companies knew about addiction risks and designed their products to maximize engagement despite that knowledge. Second, the strength of the scientific evidence connecting app-based gambling to gambling disorder. Third, the sympathetic nature of the plaintiffs—people who had no prior gambling problems and whose lives were destroyed after using products that were heavily advertised as entertainment. Fourth, the cultural shift in how addiction is understood, with greater acceptance that addiction is a brain disease rather than a moral failure.
There are also factors that could slow or limit the cases. The gambling industry has deep political connections and has successfully lobbied for protective legislation in several states. Some state gambling laws include provisions that immunize licensed operators from certain types of lawsuits. Defense attorneys will argue that users were free to stop gambling at any time and that the companies provided responsible gambling tools that users chose not to use. They will argue that gambling disorder is a pre-existing condition in vulnerable individuals rather than a product defect.
The outcome will likely depend on documents. If discovery produces clear evidence that companies designed specific features to exploit addiction vulnerability, knew those features were producing gambling disorder in a substantial percentage of users, and chose not to intervene because those users were profitable, the cases become much stronger. If the documentary evidence is ambiguous or can be characterized as normal product development and marketing, the cases become harder to prove.
Attorneys currently accepting cases are conducting detailed intake interviews to identify plaintiffs with strong facts: clear timeline of when they started using the apps, documented escalation of gambling behavior, significant financial harm, and ideally some evidence that they tried to use responsible gambling tools or self-exclude but the companies made it difficult or ineffective. They are also looking for plaintiffs who can demonstrate that they were targeted by the companies through advertising or promotional offers designed to encourage frequent use.
What Actually Happened
What happened to you was not bad luck. It was not a genetic vulnerability that you should have known about. It was not a failure of willpower or character. It was the predictable result of a business decision made by companies that had detailed knowledge of what their products do to human brains.
The companies that made sports betting apps knew from their own research that their products would cause a substantial percentage of users to develop gambling disorder. They knew this before the apps launched. They knew it from their experience operating in other countries. They knew it from the research literature on behavioral psychology and addiction. They knew it from their own internal data showing the percentage of users who exhibited compulsive gambling behavior within weeks of opening an account.
They made a business decision. They decided that the profit from users who became addicted was worth more than the cost of implementing design features that would reduce addiction risk. They decided to spend billions on advertising to acquire new users rather than millions on systems to protect vulnerable users. They decided to fight against regulations that would have required them to intervene when users showed signs of problem gambling. They decided to fund research and advocacy organizations that would provide them with political cover while doing nothing to change the fundamental design of their products.
These were not accidental outcomes. They were business decisions, made by executives with access to all the relevant data, who chose profit over safety because they calculated—correctly, so far—that the regulatory and legal consequences would be manageable. What happened to you and to hundreds of thousands of other people was the cost of that decision. It was not your fault. It was not inevitable. It was a choice that corporations made and that you and your family are paying for.