In 2018, the Supreme Court struck down a decades-old federal law against sports betting, ushering in a flood of betting platforms and apps that are now legal in most states and advertised heavily nationwide. Plenty of people are happy about this: Supportive lawmakers argue that gambling happens no matter what, and legalizing online betting enables them to regulate it and capture extra tax revenue. Meanwhile, the sports industry has raked in extra cash as leagues, teams, players, and networks partner with the same betting organizations, like DraftKings and FanDuel, that profit from their fan base. But it’s been devastating for problem gamblers. The National Council on Problem Gambling (NCPG) estimates that since sports betting became widely accessible, between 2018 and 2021, the risk of gambling addiction grew by 30 percent. And from 2021 to 2022, the organization reported a 45 percent increase in calls, texts, and chats to its helpline.

Even worse, for every person who can admit they have a problem, there are countless others who won’t — leaving their families to deal with the consequences. Here, we spoke to three women whose loved ones have gotten sucked into varying degrees of problematic sports betting.

If you or someone you know is having trouble with gambling, call, text, or chat 1-800-GAMBLER for more resources.

I first met my ex — let’s call him Pete — when we were in college together, but we were only acquaintances. We had some mutual friends, but we lost touch after freshman year. We re-met on Tinder a few years after graduation and started dating. Maybe a month or two into our relationship, he revealed to me that he never actually graduated; he’d dropped out. It was weird that he hadn’t told me earlier, and I felt a little deceived, but I understood that he was embarrassed about it. Now I see this as the first red flag, but at the time, I didn’t think too much about it. He had a good job working in hospitality, and I’m a public-school teacher. We moved in together and, after a few years, got engaged.

Before we got married, Pete confessed to me that he had a problem with sports gambling and was a few thousand dollars in debt. I had no idea. He was really into baseball, but I grew up with my dad and brother always watching sports, so it seemed normal. I was angry because we had been saving for our wedding. But he was upset about it too, and couldn’t believe that he had let it get that far. Obviously, I wanted some kind of assurance that it wasn’t going to happen anymore. And he promised me it wouldn’t. He said that he would go to Gamblers Anonymous and get a sponsor. And he did.

For a while, it seemed to help, especially the sponsor part. As far as I know, he didn’t gamble for the year before we got married. I really thought it was done. We bought a house in the suburbs and we were planning to start a family. He stopped going to Gamblers Anonymous when we moved.

Then I started to feel like something was up. I noticed that he was getting into other sports besides just baseball. All of a sudden he’d want to watch college football games or hockey games, which was odd because he’d never been into that stuff before. When he started to get moody about some random college football team, I got suspicious. But I didn’t want to acknowledge it. It’s like when you think there might be black mold in your house. Maybe you smell something strange, but you’re scared to take down the wall to look behind it, because you know there’s going to be a big problem that will take a lot of time and money to fix. And so you just don’t look.

Plus, our finances were fine. Pete wasn’t borrowing from our shared savings. There was nothing weird on our joint credit card. My credit was always much better than his, so everything was always in my name. We had enough money for our life and had what we needed. We were trying to have a baby, and I started fertility treatments.

I finally got an idea of what was happening when we were on vacation. I was checking our credit-card balance, which I do almost daily out of habit, and I noticed that there was a cash advance on it. I didn’t even know what that was. I didn’t know you could borrow cash from a credit card, because why would you ever do that? When I asked Pete about it, he was like, “Oh, I have no idea.” I called the credit-card company and told them that it was a fraudulent charge, and I went through the whole annoying process of canceling the card.

But it didn’t feel right to me. So later that day, I dug into it more. I was like, “Are you sure that you don’t know anything about this?” Eventually Pete broke down and told me that it had been him. Which was confusing to me, because it’s not like he couldn’t afford to spend $400 — I knew he had more than that in his checking account. That’s when he said he was borrowing it to pay off a much larger debt, a few thousand dollars. He admitted that it was from sports gambling. But again, he was really upset with himself and said he would stop. And I believed him. I was like, Am I really going to blow up my whole marriage over a couple thousand dollars? It seemed silly. We’d spent much more than that on fertility treatments. At the time, I thought I might be pregnant. I figured we’d work through it. I didn’t even tell my family or my friends.

A few months after that, on the same day I found out that our second round of fertility treatments hadn’t worked, I got an alert on my phone about one of our bank accounts. When I questioned Pete about it, he confessed that he was still gambling, and that he was in a lot more debt — about $40,000. Which is crazy because it wasn’t any of our money, real money; it was all lines of credit. Borrowing from one place to secure a loan from someplace else. A lot of what he owed was interest on the debt he’d accrued. I still don’t know the full extent of it. I wouldn’t be surprised if he owed more than what he told me about. It was a devastating day. I had to explain all of this to my family, and they were devastated too.

I didn’t want to get divorced. It honestly didn’t even occur to me. No one in my family gets divorced. Everyone stays together no matter what happens, and you support each other and figure it out. But when I started Googling stuff and reading Reddit threads about other women who’d had spouses involved in sports gambling, every single person was like, “Get out. If it’s happening now, it will continue to happen in the future. He will go after your kids’ college fund. There are no bounds. This is a disease that doesn’t have morals. It will infiltrate your life in ways you couldn’t even imagine. It is a nefarious addiction and you need to leave.”

I got the idea that we’d get a legal divorce, so that I could protect myself financially, but we’d stay together as a couple and I’d help him. I was very empathetic. But then he was like, “I think we should just divorce.” Like for real.

We divorced as quickly as possible. I kind of regret this now, but I gave him our entire savings account because he needed cash so badly. We’d just bought a house, so we didn’t have much left in savings — about $20,000, not enough to cover what he owed. I was like, “Just take it and I’ll keep the house.” I also kept our car. Everything was in my name anyway, and I just took him off the deed.

Financially, it definitely set me back. Suddenly I had to pay for our mortgage and car all by myself. My aunt helped me pay off the car, which I’m incredibly grateful for. Pete was much worse off. His only option was to move home with his mom. He’s still there, I think. It’s been over three years. I don’t know if he’s still gambling. I’m now remarried and just had a baby. So there’s a happy ending on my side.

I do think about him from time to time because we had started to build a life together. And because of the availability of online sports gambling now, and how silent it is, I don’t know if he’ll ever get back on his feet. Online gambling is such a unique type of addiction because you can’t see it. You can smell alcohol or see when somebody’s pupils are dilated. You can know when someone leaves the house and goes to a casino. But I couldn’t go into his phone and find every app that he could use for online gambling, or figure out all the money that he’d borrowed or spent. It’s nearly impossible. There’s almost no way to catch somebody unless they tell you, or unless you run credit reports on them to see what kind of accounts they’ve opened.

Plus, sports betting is so normalized. I see ads for the apps all the time. My brother even does it, not to an extent that I think it’s alarming, but it’s a social thing he does with his friends. At what point is it an addiction versus a hobby, or something you just do with your bros versus something that’s ruining your life? Where is that line?

I don’t share any financial accounts with my current husband, and I don’t know if I ever will. The house is still in my name and he moved in with me; he pays me a certain amount every month to help cover the mortgage and other expenses. He’s comfortable with that, and it works for us. So that’s probably the way it will be forever. He was previously married too, and his ex wasn’t truthful with him about her finances, so he understands.

For a while, I did question myself — how could I marry someone who could do this to me? But I know that gambling is a disease; it was not intentional toward me. I think Pete genuinely wanted to stop, but he couldn’t. At the end, in a way, he was trying to save me from himself.

My son is 21 and started sports betting with his friends in college. He goes to a small school in the middle of nowhere and there isn’t a lot to do. I found out when he was home last summer. He was much more into watching sports than he ever had been before, and would be really mad if his team lost. I had him show me the betting app he was using on his phone, and it seemed like he was only betting small amounts, like $10 at a time.

In the beginning, I figured it was just something to keep an eye on. I told him to be careful, but I also try to reserve judgment when he shares stuff with me. I knew that if I came down too hard, he’d just keep it to himself, and I’d rather know than not know. I’m a single parent, and it’s important to me that we’re close and he knows he can confide in me.

I also thought that he couldn’t get himself into that much trouble because he doesn’t have much money to lose. We have a joint credit card, but he knows it’s just for essentials like toiletries and stuff, or emergencies. I see everything he spends on it, and he’s never abused it. He also has his own bank account and a campus job at school that pays him minimum wage. He can use that money for whatever he wants, but it’s not a lot. He’s a good kid. He’s majoring in biology, graduating this year, and had a summer job at CVS. He’s looking for jobs at research labs.

That’s why I was really shocked to find out that he had secretly gotten into a lot of debt — like, about $2,000. It’s not a life-ruining amount of money, at least for us, thank God. But it’s serious, and much more than he can afford on his own. I couldn’t even understand how he’d done it. It turns out he got a separate credit card somehow and used it to place sports bets online.

This all came to a head a few months ago. He came home from school one random weekend, which he doesn’t do often, and seemed really down. He hadn’t been returning my calls or texts, and I was worried. But this was the last thing I expected. I thought maybe some girl had broken his heart or something, or — God forbid — he got somebody pregnant. When I picked him up from the bus, he told me he was in a lot of trouble with debt and he was really shaken up about it. I’ve never seen him so upset. I was totally shocked, but honestly a little relieved. I didn’t want to minimize it, but it seemed like a solvable problem, as long as he learned from it and never did it again.

I’m still conflicted about whether this was the right thing to do, but I paid off his debt myself, immediately, and had him shut down the credit card. He’s paying me back in installments, $250 a month. I want him to take responsibility for what happened, but I also didn’t want him to ruin his credit when he was only 21. He promised me that he would stop sports betting immediately. As far as I know, he’s followed through. He’s home for the holiday break now and seems to be okay. He clearly still feels bad about it.

I also had him freeze his credit so that he can’t open new cards so easily. Past that, there’s only so much I can do — he’s an adult, legally. I’m mostly pissed that there aren’t more safeguards in place for people his age. If anything, these betting platforms are marketed heavily to him and his peers. I’m sure a lot of his friends are still using them, and I don’t know how much trouble they’re getting into, or who’s paying for it.

Of course, I do lie awake some nights worrying that this was the beginning of a gambling addiction that will plague him for the rest of his life. And we’ve talked about that a little bit. He knows that his father had serious addiction problems and it’s something I watch out for. I don’t want him to think this isn’t a big deal, or that I’ll bail him out if he gets in trouble again. But I’m really hoping this is the last of it.

My brother started betting in fantasy football leagues during high school. He was on the football team until he got injured, and sports betting was something he and his football friends could keep doing together. Over time, the stakes just got higher and higher. For most people, I think the buy-in for fantasy football is like $10 to $15, but for him and the guys he plays with now, it’s in the hundreds. And he’s won before, so of course he’s chasing that high.

My brother is now 30 and has a lot of money difficulties. I can’t blame it all on gambling; he’s had some issues with drugs and general difficulty with personal finances. Combining the prospect of quick, easy money and the idea that he can use his knowledge of sports to get himself out of debt, he gets more into debt as a result.

I didn’t know the full extent of it until the 2023 Super Bowl. The team that he bet on lost, and he lost all of his money, which then kept him from being able to join our family on a trip we’d planned together. He also couldn’t pay his bills and had to ask us for help. He lost about $3,000, which was all the money he had. He genuinely thought he would walk away with $6,000, like it was a sure thing.

He hid all of this from us until my sister and I confronted him a few weeks later. He was so, so depressed, not leaving his apartment for days. We were like, “What is going on?” He eventually told us what had happened, and he was deeply ashamed. But I also think part of why he told us was that he was hoping we might help him financially. He couldn’t pay for gas or groceries. It was heartbreaking. We helped him with the tangible things, made sure he had food and gas, but we couldn’t give him cash because we knew what he would do with it.

I don’t know if he has lost that amount of money again since then, but I do know he continues to bet on sports through platforms like DraftKings and FanDuel, and he continues to be financially unstable. Right now, he has a full-time job and he lives with roommates. His rent is not a lot. But he’s gotten kicked out of several places where he’s lived for lack of being able to pay. He recently got his car repossessed because he defaulted on the loan. And I know it’s because his money is going to sports betting.

When I bring it up to him, he doesn’t want to talk about it. He’s a person who won’t open his mail. He doesn’t want to face bills and responsibilities and obligations, and it’s a dead-end conversation. He might say things like, “No, I’m never going to do what I did with the Super Bowl.” But he’s still doing fantasy football, and it’s ingrained in the culture that he’s a part of. This is what all of his buddies are doing. It’s what they talk about. It’s embedded into the fabric of their activities and how they have fun together.

As a result, he hasn’t been able to find stability for himself in adulthood. He can’t maintain a stable romantic relationship, much less hold down a job and maintain car payments and rent payments. I work in the mental-health field, so I’ve been careful about implementing boundaries. But as a sister, it’s overwhelming and difficult and really sad. I have these waves of deep frustration — like, “Why can’t you just …” But again, I understand what addiction does to the brain and the body. I have to measure myself in the amount of emotional energy I give to his situation. Because what can I do? I never want to see my brother homeless. But I don’t want to enable him, either.

My sister let him live with her, and I saw how that went. He stayed with her for a year and half and made no changes. I do think that for some people, change will only come by allowing them to experience the full weight of the consequences of their decisions. But I don’t know what that will look like for him, and I don’t think that’s necessarily where we want to start.

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