Tag: gambling
How Right-Wing Grifters Promote Online Sports And Crypto Gambling To Kids

How Right-Wing Grifters Promote Online Sports And Crypto Gambling To Kids

Right-wing influencer and Andrew Tate fanboy Adin Ross sits behind his computer and streams brightly colored slot games, blackjack, and roulette to his audience of loyal fans. Ross has blown through gargantuan sums of money while gambling on his livestreams and has won big jackpots.

“You have like tons of different emotions throughout your whole entire body,” Ross said about the euphoria of online gambling during an interview. “It’s just dopamine release.”

If Ross’ audience members are interested in following in his footsteps, he is setting them up to fail.

Ross is an example of influencers and right-wing figures who are promoting crypto gambling and sports betting ventures to their young audiences. Many of these figures, including Ross, have landed major sponsorship deals with gambling companies and are sometimes given house money to gamble with, removing the actual risk associated with online gambling.

Influencers are promoting these games to young viewers as gambling addiction rises among adolescents and horror stories about streamers and followers draining their bank accounts are popping up across the internet.

Meanwhile, a number of streamers have enormous and devoted followings across social media, and the lucrative industry is constantly evolving. Teens and young adults in particular have a fondness for watching livestreamers. According to a report in Wired, 21% of the users on Amazon-owned streaming platform Twitch are between 13 and 17 years old.

Twitch has had a complicated relationship with gambling and casino streamers on its platform and has placed limits on the kind of gambling that is allowed. Some influencers have spoken out about the unrealistic expectations that gambling streamers create for their fan bases.

Influencers promoting gambling and betting companies

High-profile streamers, influencers, and celebrities have aligned themselves with gaming organizations like Stake, a crypto gambling and sports betting website. These figures share videos and pictures of themselves using Stake, gamble while livestreaming, promote the website, and sometimes share gambling earnings on social media.

For instance, rapper Drake has become an official partner of Stake, and the site has sponsored a handful of other influencers.

One of the most high-profile Stake-sponsored streamers is Ross, who has a “huge, dedicated fanbase” and exclusively streams on Twitch rival Kick. Kick is a new streaming platform that is reportedly backed by Stake and is a safe haven for white nationalist-linked content creators. The website features various gambling categories that viewers can join and watch streamers play.

On Kick, Ross labels some livestreams with “#AD,” appearing to indicate that the gambling he is doing on his stream is part of a sponsorship deal. At one point, Ross was reportedly making nearly $1 million a week from his Stake sponsorship.

An 11-year-old Ross fan reportedly admitted to gambling on Stake after watching Ross’ streams.

Ross has publicly acknowledged that young kids watch his gambling streams and that past projects he has sponsored have been scams.

“By the way, that MILF token shit that I did a while back, I already told you guys, don't buy that shit,” Ross said during a livestream about a past crypto project he promoted. “I got paid a bag to do that shit. Like, I don't give a fuck. I hope none of you guys actually bought it."

During an interview on the H3 Podcast, Ross was told about the potential harms that could come from promoting crypto gambling.

“I’m learning a lot, bro,” Ross said after hearing about the potential harms gambling can have on his audience. “I’m honestly overwhelmed right now in my life. Because it’s just — it’s so new to me.”

“You make me rethink about it now, bro. …. It’s just something I — that just doesn’t click right for me,” Ross later added.

But following this interview, Ross did not stop working with Stake and airing gambling streams.


Some of Ross’ sponsored streams are bombarded with racist and antisemitic comments, which could also have a negative impact on young viewers.

Ross recently sat down with UFC president and Trump superfan Dana White for an in-person gambling event. Following their meeting, Ross claimed that White hopes to connect Ross with Trump for a stream closer to the 2024 election. (White’s UFC also has an official partnership with Stake as well.)

Jake Paul, a right-wing influencer and professional fighter who has a massive following on social media including many young fans, co-founded Betr, a “microbetting-focused gaming company” that allows users to make monetary bets on specific plays or events, rather than betting on a team losing or winning a game. Paul appears to be hoping that the instant gratification of making money on small bets drives his young audience to Betr. Additionally, Paul has previously been accused of promoting gambling to kids.

Betr also appears to be targeting users on social media platforms that are frequented by young people, including TikTok and Instagram. The company has large followings on both platforms.

Other right-leaning influencers, including professional poker player Dan Bilzerian and gambling streamer Trainwreck (real name Tyler Niknam), have worked as sponsors for gambling companies in the past.

Major media companies are getting in on the sports betting action

Other outlets and platforms in the right-wing media ecosystem have aligned themselves with the gambling and sports betting industry.

Fox Corp., the parent company of Fox News and Fox Sports, is associated with Fox Bet, a mobile app and website that allows users to make monetary bets on professional sport competitions and play casino games.

Fox Corp. CEO Lachlan Murdoch has boasted about Fox’s foray into the sports betting world, describing the venture as “a huge opportunity” for Fox Sports’ portfolio.

And in 2021, Fox acquired right-wing sports website Outkick, which includes sports wagering and betting infrastructure. During a 2021 quarterly meeting with investors, Murdoch celebrated Outkick as an outlet that “will deepen our investment in the sports wagering ecosystem.”

The right-leaning media company Barstool Sports, founded by misogynist Dave Portnoy, operates Barstool Sportsbook, a sports betting platform and mobile app that is associated with Hollywood Casino.

Adolescent gambling addiction on the rise

Reports indicate that gambling addictions are increasing among teens and children, and experts are sounding the alarm.

The legal age to gamble in the United States is 18 or 21 years old depending on the state. This has not stopped influencers and gambling and sports betting companies from promoting their products and games to adolescents.

The earlier kids are exposed to gambling, the more likely they are to become addicted to the practice, according to a gambling treatment organization. Gambling addiction has the potential to “completely derail a person’s life,” cause mental health complications, and become a “gateway drug” to other adrenaline-inducing and potentially dangerous activities like drug use.

According to research from the International Centre for Youth Gambling Problems and High-Risk Behaviors, four to six percent of high school students are addicted to gambling. Compared to the one percent of adults addicted to the activity, this is a worrisome trend.

Researchers point to adolescents' underdeveloped brain functioning and emotionally driven decision making to understand why teens and children fall victim to gambling addiction.

Some sports betting and gambling groups have been fined for targeting their offerings to people under the legal gambling age.

While speaking with ABC News, Gary Schneider, a national board member of Stop Predatory Gambling, explained that these companies are targeting young users. “They want the next generation. They label it gaming,” Schneider said. “It's really gambling."

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

Fantasy Sports Bet On The Legislature In Florida

Fantasy Sports Bet On The Legislature In Florida

The red-light district that masquerades as the Capitol building in Tallahassee, Fla., is bustling as always with the Legislature in session.

It’s the annual festival of whores, when many Florida lawmakers sell out and roll over for high-rolling special interests, if the price is right. And the price is seldom wrong.

Buying one legislator doesn’t cost that much, but getting an entire bill passed to benefit your industry requires buying (or at least leasing) a bunch of them, which adds up to big bucks.

As an example, fantasy sports companies have spent more than $220,000 to recruit top Florida legislators on behalf of FanDuel, DraftKings and other daily fantasy leagues. These are online gambling operations that desperately don’t want to be regulated like gambling operations.

The companies insist their pay-to-play games reward skill over chance, but that’s a joke. Putting down cash on a quarterback’s Sunday performance is no different than betting on a race horse or a greyhound.

New York is seeking to ban fantasy sports companies from that state because the attorney general says they violate the gaming laws. Nevada, the galactic mecca of gambling, says that FanDuel and DraftKings promote wagering, plain and simple. The attorney general of Texas calls it “prohibited gambling.”

Florida, of course, remains wide open for business. No matter how you feel about online betting, the strategy of the competing companies offers a prime lesson on how to game a polluted political process.

Sen. Joe Negron, who’s next in line to be Senate president, is pushing a law that the daily fantasy sports sites have been fantasizing about. It legalizes play, and essentially grants exemption from gaming laws.

Online companies would pay $500,000 up front to operate in Florida, and $100,000 annually to renew their licenses. Minors would be barred from playing, though the companies wouldn’t be regulated like casinos or pari-mutuels. There would be no criminal penalties for violations.

By now you’ve already guessed that Negron is taking money from the industry. A political action committee connected to the Stuart Republican received $10,000 from the Fantasy Sports Trade Association in September.

Another productive $10,000 donation went to Rep. Matt Gaetz of Fort Walton Beach. He is dutifully cheerleading a similar bill through the state House, piously declaring, “Government should have little to no involvement in the recreational daily lives of Floridians.”

Does that mean Gaetz also supports legalizing marijuana, which millions of Floridians use recreationally? Nope. Evidently the pot growers haven’t written him a big enough check.

Fantasy sports operators have laid down big bets on key lawmakers besides Gaetz and Negron. Their lobby group donated $30,000 to a political committee run by Rep. Richard Corcoran, the House appropriations chairman and future speaker of the House.

The current Speaker, Steve Crisafulli, has a PAC that took at least $10,000 from the industry. So did a committee associated with Senate Appropriations chairman Tom Lee. GOP leaders aren’t the only ones with their palms out. Fantasy sports lobbyists also gave $25,000 to the Florida Democratic Party. (It was just a gesture of politeness, since the Democrats are powerless in the Legislature.)

Not all lawmakers are up for grabs. After Nevada ruled that sites such as DraftKings promote gambling, Florida’s Senate majority leader, Bill Galvano, actually gave back $15,000 he’d received from the Fantasy Sports Trade Association.

This defies all odds, but it really happened. Spreading tons of money around usually works wonders. Just ask the Seminoles.

In 2013, the tribe forked out $500,000 to Let’s Get to Work, Gov. Rick Scott’s political action committee. Scott recently signed a new gambling compact that would give the tribe’s seven casinos exclusive rights to roulette, craps and blackjack. In return, the state would be guaranteed at least $3 billion from profit-sharing over seven years, beginning in 2017.

The Scott deal, a potential windfall for the Seminoles, has yet to be approved by the Legislature. We all know what that means: Checks are flying.

The tribe opposes legalizing fantasy sports sites, which means lawmakers can shake big donations from both sides. Already the Seminoles have distributed more than $2 million to at least 90 state politicians (mostly Republicans), several political action committees and both major parties.

This is how it gets done in American politics — you pay to play. It’s as true in Tallahassee as it is in any brothel.

(Carl Hiaasen is a columnist for the Miami Herald. Readers may write to him at: 1 Herald Plaza, Miami, Fla., 33132.)

Photo: A FanDuel logo is displayed on a board inside of the DFS Players Conference in New York November 13, 2015. REUTERS/Lucas Jackson

China Seeks To Turn Entertainers Into Moral Models

China Seeks To Turn Entertainers Into Moral Models

By Julie Makinen, Los Angeles Times (TNS)

BEIJING — Imagine if, after arresting a wave of celebrities on drug charges, American government officials pressed the heads of major Hollywood studios, A-list actors, record-label chiefs and chart-topping singers to sign promises that they would stay away from vices like drugs, pornography and gambling.

Simultaneously, substance-abusing performers found their films shut out of cinemas, forcing producers into hasty reshoots and re-edits. And news media began running editorials criticizing top directors for failing to inform on associates they had seen smoking pot or taking Ecstasy.

This is no fanciful figment: With China developing a hearty appetite for marijuana, methamphetamine and other illicit substances, Chinese authorities are training their crosshairs squarely on stars — even as they look to celebrities as front-line soldiers in the nation’s nascent war on drugs.

As of June, China had listed more than 3 million people on a roll of drug users, up from 1.8 million in 2011, according to Liang Ran, a drug-control official in the Ministry of Justice.

Millions more fly below the radar of police, and China’s National Narcotics Control Commission estimates the number of drug users to be more than 14 million, roughly 1 percent of the population. In 2014, authorities seized 69 tons of illicit drugs, arrested nearly 890,000 people on possession-type charges and almost 170,000 more on charges related to production and trafficking.

Among the celebrities who have been arrested on drug charges in the past 18 months are Jackie Chan’s son, Jaycee, and his fellow actor friend Kai Ko; the pop singer Yin Xiangjie; and actor Wang Xuebing, who had a major role in Black Coal, Thin Ice, which took top honors at the 2014 Berlin Film Festival.

Yin and Chan spent months in jail; Ko delivered a tearful public apology but nevertheless found himself cut out of films including Monster Hunt, a partially animated family film that after hurried reshoots became the top-grossing Chinese movie of all time. Wang’s drama, A Fool, abruptly had its May release date scrapped and arrived in theaters only in November with some of the supporting actor’s scenes trimmed.

But in a one-party system where even today’s Communist Party leaders maintain that art should “serve the state,” authorities are not merely setting out to punish stars who break the law. They also seek, in a time of rapidly loosening social mores, to turn entertainers into moral models — and even model informants.

The campaign has caught even the most respected celebrities flat-footed. Last month, after Yin was arrested, the state-run New China News Agency interviewed director Zhang Yimou and about a dozen major stars about their attitudes on celebrity drug use.

“I have seen many actors using marijuana together during their breaks … . It’s terrible that artists are involved in pornography, gambling and drugs,” said Zhang, who has directed such films as Hero and Raise the Red Lantern, and is in production on the big-budget The Great Wall starring Matt Damon.

“This trend is unhealthy for the industry. Many people tried to persuade me to try Ecstasy, and even told me, ‘This is the origin of inspiration,’” Zhang said.

But rather than winning praise for his propriety, Zhang was pummeled in the state-run press for failing to report the lawbreakers to police.

“Instead of protecting his actors, he was appeasing and shielding them. This will only make these movies stars more addicted to drugs,” said Eastday, a Shanghai-based news outlet. “If Zhang considered it disloyal to report his friends to the police, he has made a serious mistake, sacrificing the greater good for the sake of his self-interest.”

The Southern Metropolis Daily wrote a similar commentary headlined “Real love is informing on friends to police,” while the Global Times, a nationalist tabloid closely affiliated with the Communist Party, ran a cartoon of a sad-looking star shooting up with a hypodermic needle as Zhang watched from around a corner.

“The government wants celebrities to actively shoulder more responsibility” for spreading anti-drug messages, said Pi Yijun, an adviser to the Beijing Narcotics Control Commission. “Although celebrities are a small percentage of China’s overall drug users, they are an indicator of the trend. If more celebrities are taking drugs then so are more ordinary people.”

China, Pi said, is still much less permissive about drug use than America. And censors ensure that drug use very rarely figures in popular Chinese entertainment. A Chinese TV program along the lines of Breaking Bad would almost certainly never be approved by authorities — though the American show about a meth-cooking high school science teacher is available online in China and is popular.

“Even President Obama has acknowledged he smoked pot,” Pi said.

By pressuring people like Zhang shoes to be informants, some observers say, Chinese authorities are walking a thin line that can erode social trust and sow a culture of fear, discontent, secrecy and creative conservatism. That could undermine China’s efforts to develop a world-class entertainment industry, which officials see as a key to advancing its cultural and economic influence.

“This is the perfect ‘damned if you do, damned if you don’t’ situation. If (Zhang) told, he might be called a rat; if not, then he’d be accused of dereliction of duty,” said Ying Zhu, a scholar of the Chinese entertainment industry at the City University of New York. “The nanny state and the media/Internet vigilantes need to be mindful of the consequences of ratting out friends, colleagues, and neighbors and families … . There is a chilling price to be paid for turning people against each other while looking over one’s own shoulders.”

“Ethically,” Pi said, “Zhang should report drug users, but in Chinese culture, it’s hard to put righteousness above friends and family.”

Authorities, he added, might have more success in making it commercially risky for stars to use (or silently condone) drugs. That’s why Chinese officials are pressing measures to discourage bad behavior.

This fall, the China Alliance of Radio, Film and Television — a state-sanctioned umbrella group of official industry organizations — formed an ethics committee that it said could order individuals or organizations who violate its norms to issue public apologies. It could also disqualify them from awards, or blacklist them from the industry.

Last month, the group held a forum in Beijing, touting the fact that 50 of its member organizations had signed on to its “pledge on professional ethics and self-discipline.” (In addition to shunning drugs, the pledge also obligates signatories to “protect the leadership of the Communist Party.”

Actress Fan Bingbing, who has crossed over into Hollywood productions including X-Men: Days of Future Past and Iron Man 3 said at the forum, “A good actor must be a good person first.”

(Nicole Liu and Yingzhi Yang of The Times’ Beijing bureau contributed to this report.)

©2015 Los Angeles Times. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Photo: A participant waves a Chinese Communist Party flag as he waits backstage before his performance at a line dancing competition in Kunming, Yunnan province January 31, 2015. REUTERS/Stringer 

 

Gambling Is Losing Its Appeal In Las Vegas

Gambling Is Losing Its Appeal In Las Vegas

By Hugo Martin, Los Angeles Times (TNS)

Gambling, once the mainstay of Las Vegas, is slowly taking a back seat to other entertainment in Sin City.

The latest survey of Las Vegas visitors found that fewer people go to the city to gamble and that first-time visitors are more likely to travel there for a wedding or a convention or to visit friends and family.

The number of visitors increased to 41 million in 2014, up from 39.7 million in 2013, according to the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Bureau. But as hotel occupancy rates and hotel tax revenue rose, gaming revenue for Clark County fell from $9.7 billion in 2013 to $9.5 billion in 2014, according to the agency.

Gaming experts have long noted a trend of Las Vegas visitors cutting back on gambling to spend more time and money attending comedy performances, magic shows, and musical acts.

The latest survey of 300 visitors conducted for the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Bureau shows that the percentage of visitors who said gambling was the primary purpose for their trip to Las Vegas dropped from 15 percent in 2013 to 12 percent last year.

The percentage of first-time visitors to Las Vegas has increased from 15 percent in 2013 to 19 percent in 2014, according to the survey. Only four percent of first-time visitors said their primary reason for visiting Las Vegas was to gamble, compared with 14 percent for repeat visitors.

Instead, a higher percentage of first-time visitors said they took a trip to Las Vegas last year to vacation, attend a convention or a wedding, or to visit friends and relatives, according to the survey.

Las Vegas tourism officials say the trend reflects an evolution for the gambling hot spot.

“Las Vegas has long been known to evolve to make sure that we have something for everyone, and we will continue to evolve to make sure we are delivering on the brand promise and providing a great experience for everyone,” Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Bureau spokeswoman Heidi Hayes said.

Photo: David Herholz via Flickr