Gambling’s ground zero

Reynaldo Rivera had little interest in sports betting. He preferred playing slots and table games at casinos around Philadelphia, where he’d unwind a couple times a week after covering the graveyard shift as a tow truck driver.

But when the COVID-19 pandemic left most forms of indoor recreation off-limits in 2020, Rivera downloaded some sportsbook apps, and sampled their digital simulations of casino games.

He soon discovered that he had no reason to ever return to Rivers Casino on Delaware Avenue, or Parx Casino in Bensalem, to play slot machines and Ultimate Texas Hold’em.

“You open your phone,” he said, “and it’s right there.”

Occasional after-work gambling turned into constant on-the-job gambling. Rivera sat for hours in the cabin of his tow truck, the outside world dark and still, while he tapped and tapped on his phone.

Hundreds of dollars in losses became thousands. Then, tens of thousands. By this spring, he’d wagered about $2.4 million, losing $137,000.

As his losses ballooned, the gambling companies made sure he knew how valuable he was to them. They granted Rivera VIP status and supplied him bonus credits and gifts, like a Peloton bike, courtesy of DraftKings.

BetMGM arranged an even more remarkable reward through a sponsorship deal with the Philadelphia Phillies. On a spring evening in May 2022, Rivera was led onto the lush infield grass at Citizens Bank Park, before the Phillies played the Texas Rangers. As thousands of fans watched, Rivera tossed a ceremonial first pitch.

Yet the constant gambling and losing left Rivera feeling ashamed and foolish. He was struggling to get by, instead of living comfortably from the money he made driving a tow truck.

He just couldn’t stop.

“Listen, I don’t have a drug addiction,” Rivera, 56, said in a recent interview. “But if that’s what it feels like, that’s crazy.”

Less than a decade ago, gamblers had to invest time and physical effort if they wanted to bet on sports or play casino games, whether it meant going to Las Vegas or Atlantic City, or meeting up with a bookie. Now, it takes only the flick of a thumb to open an app.

And it’s no longer a fringe activity that needs to be sought out. Nearly everywhere Americans look, there are advertisements about sports betting or prediction markets: billboards alongside highways, banner ads in stadiums, sponsored segments in sports broadcasts, and TV and online pitches featuring global stars-turned-well-paid ambassadors, including Philadelphia 76er LeBron James, tennis legend Maria Sharapova, and Academy Award winner Jamie Foxx.

But a corollary backlash is also taking shape, as the repercussions of nearly unlimited access to gambling have become impossible to ignore.

Lawmakers are demanding greater control over how sportsbooks and prediction markets operate, while a wave of litigation is attempting to hold those companies responsible for their customers’ addictions, echoing similar legal action that’s been taken against social media companies. (Meta agreed in August to pay up to $18 billion to settle lawsuits it faced over claims that it designed its products to be addictive to children and teens.)

The impact of the gambling industry’s skyrocketing growth might be felt more acutely in Pennsylvania than anywhere else. In March, the American Gaming Association wrote in a report that Pennsylvania had the largest online gambling market in the U.S., generating $3.46 billion in revenue in 2025 — a 27.9% increase from the year before.

Pennsylvania recorded $7.7 billion in overall gambling revenue in 2025, a sum that trailed only Nevada, according to the gaming association. Pennsylvania is also one of just eight states that have thus far legalized both online gambling and sports betting.

Philadelphia, meanwhile, is the seventh-largest commercial casino market in the country, having generated $1.4 billion in 2025, the gaming association said, and last year was the top market for online gambling advertisements.

“The casino itself has expanded basically into infinity,” said Timothy Fong, the co-director of the UCLA Gambling Studies Program, which researches gambling disorders and evidence-based addiction treatments.

“The casino itself has expanded basically into infinity.”

While brick-and-mortar casinos have long wooed bettors with offers of free meals and hotel rooms, the modern gambling industry bears little resemblance to the neon palaces of past generations.

“If you go back in time, like 25 years ago, and you compare the differences, it’s obviously not the same world,” Fong said. “It’s not even the same universe, and it’s because gambling is frictionless right now. It takes very little effort to get bets down. And you also have a much wider array of choices of how to bet, what types of wagers are out there.”

The state’s Gaming Control Board last week published an annual overview of its regulatory activity, and reported that 30,000 people are enrolled in its self-exclusion programs, which prevent bettors with addictions from being able to legally gamble.

Researchers at Pennsylvania State University’s Criminal Justice Research Center have found that between 60% and 73% of adults in the state had engaged in some form of betting in 2025, with as much as 30% gambling online. The average age of online gamblers was 37, and more than 77% were men, with 61% identifying as white.

Overall, Penn State found that between 2.4% and 6.4% of Pennsylvanians might be problem gamblers — more than double the reported national average of 1% to 3%.

“That’s an inordinate amount of people,” said Eric Webber, a senior behavioral health therapist for Caron Treatment Centers, which offers addiction rehabilitation services in Pennsylvania, Florida, Georgia, New York, and Washington, D.C.

Webber, since 2013, has been treating people who have gambling addictions. The number of his patients — who include lawyers, executives, and college students — has climbed steadily since the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2018 that states could adopt their own sports betting laws.

He described one young client whose compulsions led him to coordinate a phone, laptop, and tablet to play multiple hands of blackjack simultaneously.

“I tell people this is the new epidemic,” Webber said, and Pennsylvania “is at the epicenter of it.”

Rivera is among a half dozen former customers of FanDuel and DraftKings who have recently sued the companies in Common Pleas Court of Philadelphia. Their lawsuits allege that the apps use “hyper-personalized algorithms” and loyalty programs to target “the most addicted, problem users” that make up a disproportionate chunk of the sportsbooks’ revenue.

Rivera’s lawyer, Jennifer Hoekstra, said her Pensacola, Fla.-based firm, Aylstock, Witkin, Kreis & Overholtz, has retained about 15,000 clients with similar claims, and has filed lawsuits against sportsbook operators in Delaware, Massachusetts, and New Jersey.

“FanDuel and DraftKings have created, essentially, an addiction crisis,” Hoekstra said. “They built an addictive product intentionally.”

The companies have rejected that characterization and said they offer tools that allow players to monitor and set limits on their deposits, wagering, and playing time.

FanDuel “supports and exceeds the comprehensive requirements set by Pennsylvania regulators for how we monitor customer behavior and respond to signs of harm,” a spokesperson wrote in an email.

In 2025, the company spent $158 million on responsible gaming technology, conducted 58,000 account reviews, and removed 5,700 users from FanDuel’s platform, the spokesperson said.

A DraftKings spokesperson wrote that while the company won’t comment on pending litigation, it “takes responsible engagement concerns very seriously” and has a team of more than 50 full-time employees and a chief responsible gaming officer who focus on that issue. “Responsible engagement is embedded across our business and essential to DraftKings’ long-term sustainability,” the spokesperson said.

The sportsbooks have asked judges to dismiss other lawsuits that have accused them of product liability and violating state consumer protection laws. Their attorneys have argued that FanDuel and DraftKings don’t sell an actual product, but instead offer a free app and have no obligation to protect customers from placing lawful bets, even if their gambling becomes excessive.

Shortly after Rivera’s lawsuit reached the court docket in July, DraftKings and FanDuel banned him from their apps, and the friendly VIP managers who had once texted him regularly no longer responded to his messages, his lawyer said. Yet Rivera can’t bring himself to delete the sportsbook apps from his phone. The urge to place a bet remains just under the surface, an itch he can’t scratch. Sometimes, he imagines winning back the money he’s lost.

“If I had access to them apps, I’d probably be on them,” he said. “I know I’d be on them.”

On Sept. 23, a cluster of parents walked through the echoey halls of the Russell Senate Office Building in Washington to a small, cream-colored room. Once inside, they unspooled personal accounts of how gambling addiction had impacted their lives. Politicians and advocates listened and nodded solemnly, and discussed the urgency of a newly announced gambling reform movement.

Raymond Mikesell described the inseparable bond that he shared with his son, Ray, who at the age of 4 began helping out at Cafe Raymond, the breakfast and lunch spot that Mikesell operated for 17 years in Pittsburgh, beginning in 2007. Ray became a full-time fixture in the restaurant as he grew older, whipping up blueberry ricotta pancakes in the kitchen while his father amiably chatted with customers.

By age 20, Ray had enough money to buy his own house. That picture of success was punctured when Mikesell one day received some of his son’s bank statements by mistake, and discovered that his account had been repeatedly flagged for insufficient funds.

“I said, ‘Ray, what’s going on here? You got to explain this to me,’” Mikesell recalled. “He said he was betting.”

Mikesell wanted to help his son climb out of debt. He began managing his finances, giving him an allowance, and sometimes paying his mortgage. Mikesell said he also avoided mentioning professional sports altogether, for fear that it would drive his son to place more wagers.

“Within a month, he was kicking my door down to tell me I’m ruining his life,” he said. “We all knew what it was. It was the addiction to gambling. He just wanted to bet all his money.”

Mikesell said his son spiraled deeper into addiction. He maxed out his credit cards, and his home fell into foreclosure, and then was sold at a sheriff’s sale.

“Within a month, he was kicking my door down to tell me I’m ruining his life. We all knew what it was. It was the addiction to gambling.”

Among those who had assembled in the senate room with Mikesell were U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D., Conn.) and U.S. Rep. Paul Tonko (D., N.Y.). In 2025 the lawmakers introduced the SAFE Bet Act, which would prohibit sportsbooks from marketing during live games and using artificial intelligence to inform the promotions they offer to bettors.

Blumenthal and Tonko each addressed the parents, who represented a nonprofit, Families and Friends of Gamblers, which was created with the help of the Public Health Advocacy Institute. (Lawyers for the institute in March sued FanDuel, DraftKings, and the NFL on behalf of Terry Thompson and Christopher Sage, men from the Philadelphia suburbs who developed sports gambling addictions.)

Blumenthal accused sportsbook companies and prediction markets of exploiting their customers’ compulsions.

“It drives families apart. Ruins people’s careers,” he said. “It basically decimates lives, because gambling can be an addiction. We know it’s an addiction. It’s a disease, like every addiction.”

Tonko and Blumenthal in August demanded that FanDuel end its VIP services, citing reporting from The Inquirer that revealed that a FanDuel VIP host had sent a personalized video of Phillies star Bryce Harper to Thompson, who earlier this year planned to end his life after gambling away the last of his family’s savings.

A FanDuel executive disclosed to the lawmakers in a Sept. 24 letter that the company has sent approximately 30 personalized videos from athletes and entertainers to its customers during the last two years, but said such perks are not meant to encourage betting.

In response to the congressional scrutiny, the Major League Baseball Players Association has said it would support prohibiting players from doing promotional work for gambling VIP programs.

Such measures arrived too late for Mikesell’s son.

A few days before Thanksgiving in 2024, Mikesell spoke by phone with Ray, who was still staying in his foreclosed-upon house in South Fayette. Neither knew that Allegheny County Sheriff’s Office deputies planned that day to serve Ray with an eviction notice.

When the deputies later arrived and knocked on Ray’s door, they heard a single gunshot.

Ray, 24, had died by suicide.

Mikesell later said that he didn’t believe his son had planned on taking his life — he had already packed his belongings and his two cats in his car — but might have panicked when he saw police at his property.

“We found a note in his garage,” Mikesell recalled. “It said, ‘Please take care of my cats.’”

Grief-stricken, Mikesell contacted Rep. Jason Ortitay, an Allegheny County Republican, to ask if anything could be done to address gambling addiction. Earlier this year, Ortitay introduced a bill that would prevent betting apps from being accessed within Pennsylvania schools.

“I called my wife and daughter, and we cried,” Mikesell said, his voice breaking. “Because it’s a small step in a big thing that’s going to mean a lot someday soon.”

After police closed their investigation into Ray’s suicide, investigators returned his cell phone to his parents. They discovered that a month after his death, Ray’s phone was still buzzing with promotional offers from gambling companies.

“There was one text from DraftKings,” Mikesell said, “asking him, ‘Are you betting with someone else? What’s going on?’”

Tales of tragedy and heartache like Mikesell’s have spurred other legislative and legal efforts to rein in sportsbooks and prediction markets.

Pennsylvania lawmakers are drafting legislation to ban in-game microbets and curtail VIP programs, and have introduced additional bills to prohibit consumers from using credit cards to place wagers, restrict gambling entities’ ability to send push notifications to customers, and ban insider trading on prediction markets.

The Sports Betting Alliance — a national advocacy organization whose members include FanDuel, DraftKings, BetMGM, bet365, and Fanatics — has said it would oppose legislation to eliminate microbets, and has likened VIP services to rewards that retailers like Starbucks offer to frequent customers.

New York Attorney General Letitia James has sued prediction markets Polymarket and Kalshi, accusing each of operating illegal gambling platforms. The federally regulated markets are available in 50 states, and customers can be as young as 18, while the legal gambling age remains 21.

Prediction market officials insist that their products are not gambling apps — even after recording tens of billions of dollars in sports wagers during the FIFA World Cup — but rather a financial product similar to the stock exchange.

In early September, New Jersey Attorney General Jennifer Davenport petitioned the Supreme Court to decide whether states should have the authority to regulate prediction markets as they do gambling.

Amid those legal tussles, researchers are still assessing the complex picture of addiction that has been associated with the widespread growth of online sports betting and prediction markets.

In early September, Bank of America Institute published an analysis that showed the largest share of customers who engaged in online betting in July came from lower- and middle-income households.

The institute said that median account balances of households that participated in online betting was 59% of those that did not, but didn’t include demographic or other details about those customers.

“There’s something called the gambler’s fallacy, which basically goes like this: ‘If I keep doing this, I have to win,’” said Webber, who conducts inpatient rehabilitation at Canon’s 110-acre campus in Berks County.

“From a biological standpoint, it’s a dopamine rush, so even if I’m losing, I’m getting a reward. It’s the excitement of the chance — ‘I might get this. And VIP [rewards] are going to make me feel like the man.’”

In June, researchers from West Virginia University and the University of Oviedo published a study suggesting that the legalization of sports betting could lead to a 3% increase in the annual divorce rate. “Effects emerge gradually and are driven almost entirely by online wagering,” the authors wrote. (The study, which examined state and county data from 2012 to 2024, has not yet been peer-reviewed.)

“It’s the excitement of the chance — ‘I might get this. And VIP [rewards] are going to make me feel like the man.’”

A 2025 report from the Democrat-leaning Progressive Policy Institute, meanwhile, found a 36% decrease in bankruptcies between 2019 and 2024 in states that legalized online sports betting, with “no sign of a tidal wave of bankruptcies or consumer credit downgrades.”

That same year, The Lancet Regional Health-Europe published a study that showed suicide was the leading cause of death among 6,899 patients in Norway who had a gambling disorder between 2008 and 2021.

Though those patients had a higher suicide risk than the general population, the researchers found that gambling addiction had a lower suicide risk than substance use disorders, alcohol dependence, psychotic disorders, or mood disorders.

None of that research, though, captures how easily even a new gambler’s experience can escalate from a fun diversion to a life-altering obsession.

When John Field turned 21, he opened accounts with DraftKings and FanDuel, and occasionally placed football parlay bets when he hung out with friends. Eventually, he tried the apps’ casino offerings, and became hooked on slots — 20 cents a spin at first, then 50 cents, then 5 bucks, then 10 dollars.

He gambled nonstop at a warehouse job that he held in Clifton Heights, but hid this newfound compulsion from those closest to him. He felt like he was leading a double life.

“Have you ever seen the show Severance?” Field asked, referring to the Apple TV sci-fi show in which office workers live separate lives in and out of work. “It was just like that. I had to basically pretend like I was a completely different person.”

One person knew the truth: Field’s mother, Debbie. She still had access to his bank account from when he was younger and observed that Field was regularly moving money to a FanDuel account.

“It started off slow,” Debbie said, “and then every year, it got worse.”

Field recognized that he had a problem, and said he tried several times to close his FanDuel or DraftKings accounts. But then he felt a maddening urge to start gambling again.

“Every time I’d run out of money, I’d see an ad, like, ‘Deposit 50 bucks and get $500 in casino credit.’ So when I was down real bad I’d download the other apps,” Field said. “I knew they’d give me a bunch of money to start with.”

His phone eventually held apps from Fanatics, BetRivers, Borgata Online, BetMGM, Caesars Palace Online, SugarHouse, Stardust, and Bally Bet. Some weeks, he gambled away nearly his entire paycheck.

“Every time I’d run out of money, I’d see an ad, like, ‘Deposit $50 bucks and get $500 in casino credit.’ So when I was down real bad I’d download the other apps.”

Debbie Field saw that her son’s bank account was plunging into negative figures, and accruing overdraft fees. She implored him to disclose his addiction to his longtime girlfriend. The couple had started dating when they were sophomores at Penncrest High School in Middletown, Delaware County, and were planning to get an apartment together.

“I was like, ‘John, you can’t move in with your girlfriend without telling her. You tell her, or we will,’” Debbie recalled. “He was petrified.”

Field told his girlfriend about his struggles with addiction. The couple forged ahead and moved in together in February 2025.

“I figured we got our own place, I got rent, bills, I really should probably stop this,” Field said. “And it just, again, got way worse. Because then when I lost money, I was like, ‘Holy s—, I have to pay rent, I have to get groceries.’”

He chased his losses, diverting more money into gambling apps.

By March 2025, Field needed his parents to pay his rent. Two months later, he and his girlfriend broke up. Heartbroken, he moved back in with his parents, and agreed to participate in online therapy sessions through ETHOS Treatment.

Field’s therapist, Phil Waibel, said there is so much demand for gambling addiction treatment, he now has a waiting list for his group sessions. “It’s taking the hearts and minds of young people — especially young men — at an astonishingly high rate,” he said.

Waibel has treated patients who discovered that it was difficult to escape gambling marketing and push notifications even when they attempted to quit.

“They’re seeking out even those people who have gone out of their way to block or delete contacts, to self exclude or unsubscribe from email lists,” Waibel said. “They continue to be bombarded, which would indicate a predatory or extremely offensive stance, to loop people back in as soon as possible.”

Field, 27, said he now feels like his addiction is under control. He excluded himself from all gambling activities in Pennsylvania, secured a union job with a construction company, started going to a gym, and began repairing relationships with friends and family members.

“Every aspect of my life is significantly better,” he said.

Yet gambling isn’t out of the picture entirely.

Recently, Field used Venmo to send some money to his sister, and faced a pop-up ad from a casino app that offered a $1,000 deposit match and up to 1,000 spins.

“Sign up today,” the message read.

After opening his Instagram app, he encountered ads for Charming Cat Fortunes — a slots game from PlayLive! Casino whose motto is “Stay entertained 24/7” — in addition to ads for a gold digger-themed slots game from betParx.

Field estimates that he sees nearly 20 gambling ads across various social media platforms each day. “I’d be having a good day, not thinking about it,” he said, “and then boom, you’d see an ad, and feel that little itch, and you just kind of got to get rid of it.”

He now considers the barrage of advertising to be a form of motivation.

“It’s like, ‘F— these guys.’ All they’re trying to do is shove it down my throat,” he said. “It’s just insane how inescapable it is.”

The Inquirer will continue to report on issues related to the growth of gambling addiction — among teens and adults — across Pennsylvania. If you, or someone you know, wants to speak with a reporter, please contact David Gambacorta or William Bender at dgambacorta@inquirer.com and wbender@inquirer.com