Underage Gambling

The Internet cannot firmly verify an individual's personal information without legal identification, which a website cannot demand of its visitors unless it is federally sponsored. Internet gambling websites generally do not have such an identification screening. Therefore, if someone who is under legal gambling age signs up for an account and claims to be of legal age, using his own credit card, there is no way for the gaming website to verify the information, meaning that young people can create accounts with false information at will as long as they are not later caught.

The Internet became part of the mainstream in the mid-1990s, exactly when today's teenagers and young adults were old enough to learn to use computers, and they started to gain major interest in them. As a result, the majority of teens and young adults today are proficient users and spend extensive time on their computers and on the Internet.

Gambling, especially poker, has exploded in popularity in past years, especially with the primetime television showings of the World Series of Poker, which in past years has seen amateur players win grand prizes of $2.5 million (2003), $5 million (2004), and $7.5 million (2005). To add to this, the 2004 World Series of Poker saw many players under the age of twenty two win big. After seeing such results, the dream of winning a World Series of Poker event seems a bit more realistic to teenagers.

Two of the last three winners of the Main Event qualified for the tournament by winning an online tournament first. From here, it is only logical that computer-proficient teens who like watching poker would start playing online so that they can improve their skills and someday play on TV like their heroes do. In fact, 19.6% of young men gamble online, 2.4% gambling on a weekly basis. (West, Nathaniel)By gambling at such an early age, these young men are more likely to become pathological gamblers as adults.

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