The “bad people” narrative in online gambling—when regulation and institutional design fall out of view

When online gambling losses make the news, cameras fix on victims’ faces, operator logos, and courthouse sound bites, while how continued betting is engineered tends to sit in the background. VIP programs that select high-stakes customers and concentrate perks and outreach, as well as algorithms that prioritize outreach across customers, tend to stay in the background as well.

VIP structures in online gambling

One reported case of online gambling loss involved about AUD 4,500,000 raised as investment deposits, which flowed to the bookmaker and did not return (Source: ABC Australia / Four Corners, 2025-10). At the front are figures: the adviser who breached clients’ trust, the angry couple, the judge who left remarks.

Meanwhile, VIP programs that concentrate perks and contact on a small number of high-spending users, along with algorithms that decide whom to encourage to bet and in what order, shape the rules for allocating revenue and losses. AUSTRAC, Australia’s financial intelligence unit that also supervises and enforces against gambling operators, filed a civil complaint in the Federal Court of Australia against Entain, the UK-based holding company that owns Ladbrokes and other bookmakers.

In that statement of claim it is alleged that 2% of customers generated 65% of net revenue (Source: AUSTRAC Statement of Claim v Entain, 2025-03). Based on this ratio, conditions such as whom to register as a VIP, when to run an affordability check on ability to pay, and at what loss level to trigger an automatic stop are assembled as part of the internal incentive design. Person-focused coverage makes those designs and thresholds less visible.

Personalized responsibility across industries

The pattern in online gambling—people’s stories move forward while institutional and allocation design becomes a blind spot—repeats across sectors. The same storyline—faces foregrounded, design backgrounded—recurs across sectors.

Risk management is delegated to individuals via “self-management” tools, while changes to registration terms, oversight methods, and stop thresholds often remain obscure. Fossil fuel firms accumulated internal climate-risk research, while external messaging stressed “scientific uncertainty” (Source: InsideClimate News, 2015). Social media firms extend time spent through infinite scroll and autoplay, while offering time and parental controls and treating usage boundaries as a matter of individual self-determination (Source: U.S. Senate, 2024-01).

Opioid-related deaths associated with the promotion of prescription opioids including Purdue Pharma’s OxyContin are estimated at about 600,000 cumulatively across the United States, and bankruptcy plans and settlements are reallocating responsibility between the company and public bodies (Source: U.S. DOJ / U.S. Bankruptcy Court, 2025-03).

In gambling, after UK regulation, the regulator tightened rules on VIP registration criteria and affordability checks. It later reported that, comparing 2019–20 with 2023–24, the number of VIP registrations had fallen by about 95% after the rules were tightened (Source: UK Gambling Commission, High Value/VIP Schemes Monitoring Report, 2025-07).

By shifting risk management onto individuals through self-exclusion schemes, time and usage limits, and medication guidance, individuals bear more of the burden of harm avoidance, while firms’ and regulators’ institutional responsibility appears lighter. The UK example marks a partial intervention in that structure, yet institutional rewrites of registration and oversight often stay in the background.

Blame and hidden institutional design

As with the fossil fuel, social media, and pharmaceutical cases, which parts of the online gambling system are seen is steered by people’s stories. News often places the adviser with large losses, the trade group absent from press conferences, and the user who could not exit their gambling problem as clear targets of blame.

That arrangement gives sharp contours to anger and confusion over who should bear responsibility and to what extent. Meanwhile, the earlier-mentioned VIP registration terms, affordability thresholds, and automatic loss-stop lines sit where internal incentives meet regulatory rules and judicial frameworks.

How the system is assembled directs where blame concentrates, and that direction then constrains which rule changes are politically and economically acceptable, creating a mutual feedback loop. Placing the question of viewpoint—what each design change renders invisible from which position—next to one’s direction of blame can mark a quiet dividing line when shifting the gaze from story to system.