36-year-old man committed suicide after being enticed by illegal betting sites

A coroner has called for better awareness of the “risks” posed by illegal gambling sites after a 36-year-old man committed suicide.

An inquest revealed that football fan Oliver Long took his own life in 2024, after losing his job, flat and relationship due to a “severe gambling addiction”.

Although he signed up to the self-exclusion scheme GamStop to prevent him from accessing gambling websites and apps, he started betting again after being “targeted” by unlicensed overseas firms that are not blocked by the not-for-profit organisation.

‘Predatory’

The inquest was told that an online search for “Not on GamStop” directs users to content explaining how to access black market websites.

Tim Miller, the Gambling Commission’s Executive Director of Research and Policy, explained that some of these websites are operated by “criminal networks” who are involved with “terrorists and organised crime”.

“Because of our work we had over 81,000 individual URLs being removed from search engines, a lot of those will have been ‘not on GamStop’ sites”.

Oliver’s sister Chloe said: “The gambling products he encountered were not harmless entertainment. They stripped away Ollie’s enjoyment of the game he loved so much. They were highly addictive, predatory systems designed to exploit. And they did.”

Liverpool FC

Speaking to the BBC, Chloe explained: “Ollie’s gambling was exclusively on football, and football was one of Ollie’s biggest passions.

“He was a huge Liverpool fan, and we know that he had a very big win early on, and that was really problematic for him.”

In his suicide letter, she said he “talked about how he had decided to take his own life because of his gambling problem, and how he felt that he couldn’t escape it” and “that he didn’t want to burden us anymore”.

Crisis

The Gambling Commission’s annual survey on gambling harm revealed that almost half of adults in Britain gambled in September.

While it claimed that the increase in problem gambling was “statistically stable”, Will Prochaska, the Director of the Coalition to End Gambling Ads, disagreed.

He stated: “The Gambling Commission releases these statistics as if nothing is wrong. But there’s something very wrong when over a million people have a gambling problem and millions more are being harmed.”