From what started as a fairly useful, and much-needed 'official' outlet to quell any online gambling urges, it is painfully obvious that it's not particularly ruthless in its application, as more of Gamstop's skeleton's fall out of the cupboard, with its many shortcomings laid bare for all to see.
Mind you, whilst far from perfect, it should be viewed as a tool and not much else. The uptake in 16-24 year-olds using its service is telling in that they're likely to be less knowledgeable about the whys and whats of gambling, and so are of the belief that Gamstop's signup process spells the end of the matter, much like many of today's easily accessible apps and everything else.
Yet as we're finding out, Gamstopping doesn't mark an industry triumph in controlling Problem Gambling, as the system's easily circumvented, with Crypto casinos at the fore. Nor is there any preventative 'One-size-fits-all' elucidation to curb extreme gambling behaviours, as one is just as likely to walk into a bookies if they so desired and lose the shirt off their back.
Few will know of Gamstop's inner workings and methods, and what they may entail further down the trough. Yet in terms of blocking access to logging on to a slew of UK-licensed casinos, it's a revelation. Not much else, mind, but it does something- and in my case, it serves its very limited purpose.
When casinos up and down the land play hardball in closing one's accounts,
and by God do they do everything to prevent the user from making a clean break from their establishment (often merely putting your account on 'hiatus' and outright refusing to sunder the arrangement so that you can come back), the done thing would be to find the closest thing to an official blanket ban - and this is it!
I don't subscribe to the theory that it's indicative of rampant problem gambling, but more a necessary outlet to get done what casinos don't wish to do. And from what I've seen, the industry loves to put everything in neat little boxes, whereby you can't
truly facilitate what you need to leave, but upon using one of these schemes, you're instantly pariah-d, to the point that you're now tainted indefinitely (barring the aforementioned 150 ways to resume gambling by other means of course).
So not the greatest betting impediment you'll ever see, but useful to those wishing to relinquish some form of control. After all, isn't
that being in control?
