I was only eleven years old when Rush Hour 2 was released, but I can vividly recall Ricky Tan’s boastful opening gambit to Inspector Lee as he sat in the control room of the Red Dragon Casino. Tan had appropriated his accomplice’s Vegas casino for money laundering, and while overlooking its bustling roulette and blackjack tables on the floor below him, he enviously remarked, “Imagine a business where people hand you money, and you hand them back . . . absolutely nothing. Now that’s a real American dream.”

By running a multinational criminal enterprise, Tan was breaking the laws that allow capitalism to function. But his description of a casino gestures toward what his business and a legitimized commercial operation have in common. It’s not simply because, as in Tan’s case, casinos are often a magnet for criminals wanting to launder ill-gotten gains into a predominantly cash-based operation. It’s also because casinos, like criminal enterprises, defy free-market logic and violate the unwritten rules of commerce.

Incongruous with the promise of consumer capitalism, commercial gambling is predicated on a total misalignment between the interests of the vendor and the vendee. There is no exchange of funds for goods or services; instead the gambler is trying to win money from the operator, and the operator is trying to take as much of the gambler’s cash as it possibly can. This adversarial relationship has led to a culture of extractive innovation that is simply not in the consumer’s interest. When Len Ainsworth, founder of slot machine manufacturer Aristocrat Leisure, was asked the secret of his company’s success, he replied simply, “Building a better mouse trap.”

But even prior to the invention of slot machines, some casino table games were so alluring that they were banned all over Europe. The casino version of roulette was named after the French game roulet but was born of a fusion between the English wheel game even-odd and the Italian board game biribi. From its more primitive form, it grew through refinement to become so addictive and compelling that by the nineteenth century it had spread across Europe and the United States, captivating even Fyodor Dostoevsky, whose novella The Gambler is based on his own addiction.

The contemporary, “single-zero” version of roulette, introduced by François and Louis Blanc in 1843, was barred in most of Europe by 1860, when the German government followed other jurisdictions in prohibiting gambling entirely. For nearly a century, roulette could only be played legally in the last remaining casino operation in Monte Carlo.

Its appeal lies in the possibility of winning much more than has been staked by offering odds of 35 to 1 on a chosen number. But there are 37 possible numbers in single-zero roulette, so the true odds are 36 to 1, and this built-in house advantage means it is statistically impossible to win over a prolonged period. Keeping the player at the table for as long as possible is therefore the goal, and the game’s design infuses the gambler with a belief that they are only one spin away from winning back their losses. However, the 2.7 percent house advantage means that as long as they keep going back, they will eventually lose it all.

When Britain legalized roulette in the 1960s, it recognized its addictiveness by confining its play to casinos and restricting not only the number of casinos but also where they could be located. However, in 2001, unregulated high street betting shops illegally introduced roulette on their machines, known as fixed odds betting terminals, or FOBTs. These were like slot machines, but they had touch screens, and each location was allowed to have four of them. They became so lucrative that bookmakers would open more shops to circumvent this limit, sometimes even opening a betting shop right next door to the first one. One high street in East London had twenty betting shops, meaning eighty FOBTs, which became known as the “crack cocaine of gambling” because around half of those who interacted with them experienced severe gambling addiction.

There was one betting shop at the end of the street I grew up on in Southend-on-Sea, a city that’s situated where the River Thames meets the North Sea, forty miles east of London. I had walked past this particular betting shop many times, but I first went in with a friend when I was around sixteen years old. Both of us were too young to gamble legally, but we were able to place bets without being asked to prove our age.

It was 2006, the year after FOBTs were legalized by the UK government in the 2005 Gambling Act. Arsenal was playing Manchester United at Highbury, and I bet £2 on Thierry Henry to score and Arsenal to win 1–0. While waiting for my friend to make his selection, I put the few pounds I had in my pocket into the FOBT. After a few spins of the virtual roulette wheel that took no longer than a couple of minutes, I had a balance of £20, which I cashed out.

I went up to the desk with my receipt, and before my friend even had a chance to pay for his bet on the match, I was already a winner. I later learned that this early win was the trigger that set off a spiral of addiction. I quickly found myself in a betting shop at every given opportunity — lunch breaks at school, entire Saturdays, any time I had to spare.

To feed my developing addiction, I started working in an energy company’s call center during evenings and weekends. Working sixteen hours a week gave me an income of £650 a month, and most of the time that sum was lost on payday. The hours I worked and the hours I gambled added up to more than a fifty-hour week, which seriously impacted my studies.

Despite falling monumentally short of the grades required, the University of Birmingham still accepted my application. But as soon as I arrived, I clocked the betting shop right near campus. This would be where I would spend the majority of my time over the next eighteen months.

On one particular Monday, I lost my entire student loan for that semester as soon as it was deposited into my bank account. It’s difficult to explain quite how captivating and adrenaline-inducing these machines were — I was almost in a trance while gambling.

When the adrenaline from that particular gambling session started to wear off, it dawned on me that its implications might be life-changing and that I might have to quit university. With no access to money, no ability to escape my gambling-induced problems by sedating myself with yet more gambling, and only reality to face up to about where my addiction had led me, I became suicidal and made plans to take my own life. I was nineteen years old.

At rock bottom, I remember experiencing overwhelming feelings of guilt and a loss of agency. I no longer felt in control of my own life, and while I had racked up significant debts that took many years to repay, it wasn’t just the loss of money that led to a collapse in my mental health. It was what gambling had done to my brain.

The rapid event frequency, high stakes, and addictive roulette content on FOBTs had brought on a form of psychological dependence. The bookmakers hadn’t done anything particularly clever. They had simply put a centuries-old game of roulette onto a machine and sped it up.

While in recovery, I became the spokesperson for the Campaign for Fairer Gambling (CFG), an entity funded by the philanthropist Derek Webb, and I lobbied successfully for a reduction in the maximum stake on FOBTs from £100 to £2 per spin. As the retired inventor of Three Card Poker — the most successful proprietary casino table game ever — Webb was an unexpected ally. His motivation came from a firsthand understanding of how game design impacts player behavior, and of the dangers that would come from making casino table games more widely accessible. Following CFG’s relaunch in the United States, Webb told the Washington Post, “You put the most addictive behavior on the most addictive device. What could go wrong?”

The addictive device he was referring to is the smartphone, which has now superseded the FOBT as a delivery mechanism for table games and slots. It’s a platform that is more addictive, always accessible, and has a greater propensity to drive user engagement. Since the inception of the internet and subsequently mobile gambling, everyone now has a casino in their pocket that tracks their behavior.

Last year, I was invited to a lunch put on by a gambling industry media organization, during which its CEO stood up to deliver a rousing speech just before the food was served. In attendance were iGaming operators, who were described as “pioneers” for putting “casinos on the internet.” Many such entities were ostensibly online bookmakers, taking bets on horse racing and sports. But in the same way that FOBTs bastardized the betting shop, online slots and casino games quickly became the sector’s priority. The revenue generated by the much more addictive content far exceeds anything else, with online slots now responsible for more than half of online gambling revenues.

Like the statistics surrounding FOBTs, around 45 percent of those who engage with online slots and casino games experience gambling problems, and online slots have a six times higher rate of “problem gambling” than other products. More than 85 percent of the sector’s revenues come from just 5 percent of its customers, most of whom are losing more than they can afford. When the UK Gambling Commission made it mandatory for operators to carry out affordability checks before assigning their customers VIP status, which would trigger more inducements to gamble, the number of VIPs decreased by 90 percent. These kinds of VIP status programs are now prevalent in the United States and have become the subject of lawsuits against operators for their aggressive and relentless bespoke marketing from personally assigned “VIP hosts.”

This is reflective of a commercial model based on cross-promoting the most addictive content and extracting as much as possible from a user until they have nothing left to lose. And given the shift to app-based gambling, the addictive casino table game content and VIP hosts aren’t the only tools at operators’ disposal.

In Britain, 35 percent of people classified as “problem gamblers” — those who continue gambling despite experiencing harmful effects — receive daily incentives to gamble, compared to 4 percent of those who are not experiencing any harm. The High Court of England and Wales recently ruled against Sky Bet — a brand owned by Flutter Entertainment, which also owns the sports gambling company FanDuel — for unlawfully using data from someone clearly suffering from a gambling addiction, leading to them receiving extra incentives and marketing messages to make them gamble even more.

The litigation revealed the extent to which personal data is shared among online gambling operators and various third parties in the advertising technology industry. Sky Bet collected granular data on the claimant, using around five hundred data points that were updated continuously in real time to build algorithms that could predict his future behavior, such as the likelihood he’d be enticed into trying a new product or his propensity to act on a special offer.

This led to an intensive marketing campaign that fed the claimant’s addiction, who went on to lose tens of thousands of pounds. He received an average of two emails a day from Sky Bet prompting him to accept bonuses, offers, and free bets.

The claimant challenged the lawfulness of this data usage in the High Court and won. Despite all the information held on the claimant, only simplistic monetary value thresholds were used to trigger regulator-mandated interventions, which Sky Bet said he had not reached, despite losing tens of thousands of pounds.

Prior to this ruling, the UK Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), which oversees data regulation, responded to a complaint from my advocacy group, Clean Up Gambling, alleging a breach of data law. This was following an investigation we commissioned from the research institute Cracked Labs, which determined the vast scale of data broadcasting and detailed the intimacy of the information harvested from users.

The data gambling platforms gather about their customers are then used to create a profile of digital behavior. This includes details such as whether individuals are positively or negatively influenced by advertisements, what time of day they play, what their favorite games are, and what “life stage” they are in.

The ICO ruled that Sky Bet had deployed surveillance technology on devices without giving users sufficient notification or input, finding “a pixel embedded within SkyBet to facilitate the setting of approximately 40 third-party” surveillance tools. Those tools allowed for the profiling and behavioral analysis of all visitors to the website. The ICO took the rare step of issuing a reprimand against the company for what it deemed to be unlawful conduct.

While gambling lobbyists and sector representatives try to talk up “responsible gambling,” operators are devising mechanisms to drive even more engagement with already addictive online casino content. It is fair to assume that in the United States — where data law is far less restrictive than in the UK — the practices are even more widespread. At present, however, only seven of the thirty-one US states that allow mobile sports betting have also legalized iGaming. Knowing how lucrative it has been in Britain and other international markets, the end game for the sector is to bring addictive online slots and casino content to as many American smartphones as possible.

The case made by the gambling lobby in pursuit of this goal centers on combating the black market. Illegal iGaming is already accessible, lobbyists argue, so states are missing out on tax revenues and oversight opportunities by denying iGaming legitimization. But the inconvenient truth for the sector is that the legalization of sports betting hasn’t displaced a black market that is already entrenched among US consumers. In fact, according to the market surveillance platform Yield Sec, illegal online gambling operators now control 74 percent of the $90 billion US online gambling marketplace. Last year, illegal gambling revenues grew twice as fast as those of the legal industry.

The solution to illegal gambling isn’t to create a race to the bottom with criminal enterprises. It’s to carry out the necessary enforcement work to disrupt these operations and make their platforms as inaccessible as possible to the public. But in trying to convince states to legalize iGaming, the gambling lobby is peddling three distinct narratives.

The first is the false notion that it is not possible to regulate the internet to the extent that illegal gambling is censured, and so legal operators must be allowed to compete with illegal ones for market share. In reality, it is perfectly possible to restrict access to harmful online content for the vast majority of people, gambling-related or otherwise. Holding Big Tech accountable for the promotion of illegal gambling sites by repealing Section 230 in the United States would be a good start — something that senators Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Dick Durbin (D-IL) are advocating for.

The second narrative advanced by the gambling lobby is that by allowing licensed operators to compete commercially with illegal gambling sites, standards of consumer protection and harm reduction will somehow improve. Illegal gambling operators pay no taxes and abide by no regulations, so competing with them through tax cuts and liberalization is impossible. But the idea that this is feasible is very convenient for a gambling lobby seeking to reduce taxes and regulations for its own industry.

Third, while the sector’s representatives emphasize the threat from the black market to drive down regulation, they also assert the rights of states to oversee legal gambling in order to stave off federal oversight. The reality is that states are crying out for help from the federal government, which could very easily take action against the jurisdictions harboring illegal gambling operators — such as Curaçao, Antigua and Barbuda, and Malta — that are eating into the tax revenues the sector promised.

However, involving the federal government in online gambling opens the door to minimum standards of consumer protection being imposed on states, which is what the gambling lobby wants to avoid. In the absence of these standards, some states are taking action to address increasing rates of gambling harm within their communities. Ohio now offers Gamban, the device-based gambling blocking software I cofounded, for free to all residents. More states are expected to emulate this. Gamban, which has over seventy-five thousand active users, is installed on a person’s devices when they decide they want to quit gambling. It then blocks access to more than two hundred thousand websites and apps globally, with the protection designed to be difficult to remove for the duration they specify. Such solutions are important in aiding gambling abstinence, but they are a mere antidote for harm that has already occurred.

The way things stand now, the general trend is bad and only going to get worse. It is the first time in human history that slots and casino games are this accessible. The British experiment that turned every high street into a roulette parlor — and then every smartphone into a casino — has had miserable consequences. In the UK, one in ten people is directly or indirectly harmed by gambling, and 9 percent of eighteen- to twenty-four-year-olds are problem gamblers.

It is not too late for the United States to change course by commencing enforcement work against the illegal gambling market and embracing federal oversight to drive up standards in the legal market. The expansion of iGaming should pause until the right consumer protections are in place, informed by public policy that adequately regulates supply and constrains consumption. You need only look to the UK, where successive governments — captured by vested interests — have pursued the growth of the gambling industry at the expense of public health, to see the disastrous impact of an approach that, by its own logic, demands that more people gamble more of their money away.