Strengthening oversight and integrity: The multi‐faceted role of centralized player tracking systems in gambling

Player Tracking Systems can simultaneously improve the efficacy of harm-reduction measures and curtail illegal gambling-related practices The societal costs of problem gambling (PG) outweigh the potential tax revenue from people who gamble 1. Hence, it is crucial to not only enhance the effectiveness of existing harm minimization tools, such as voluntary self-exclusion, but also to detect players at risk for harm before their problems become significant. To this end, Newall & Stanson 2 shed light on an important prevention tool: Player Tracking Systems (PTS). The authors posit that these systems would benefit harm reduction measures by providing access to real-world gambling data, generalizing the use of harm reduction measures across gambling platforms and serving as a reliable tool to assess the efficacy of newly introduced measures. Newall & Stanson's arguments regarding the improved efficacy of self-exclusion have merit. In addition to the various citations provided in their article 2, a scoping review highlights the desire among people who gamble for a streamlined process to self-exclude from multiple venues simultaneously. Unless addressed, the administrative burden may serve as a negative nudge, inadvertently enabling the circumvention of self-imposed limits 3. Self-exclusion aside, a PTS may also boost the efficacy of harm minimization measures offered by operators whereby, for instance, trained employees are tasked with reaching out to patrons screened as being at risk for gambling problems. Although such programs currently appear to have limited efficacy 4, 5, complementing them with a PTS could increase their utility. People who gamble can easily hop between venues and platforms, making it difficult for employees to accurately grasp each patron's true gambling intensity. For instance, an employee who uses the Canadian lower-risk gambling guidelines 6 as a reference would consider a weekly patron to be on the lower spectrum of gambling risk and refrain from intervening, even though a targeted intervention would have been recommended if total gambling involvement across venues had been considered. Although Newall & Stanson argue for a PTS that is as universal as possible in terms of gambling formats and modes, the choice of jurisdiction might be just as crucial. For instance, in Canada and the United States, gambling is regulated at both the federal and the state/provincial level. Each of these jurisdictional entities have their own legal reach and constraints. Determining whether a PTS should cover gambling operators at the state-, country- or continent level will prove to be a difficult task. An efficient approach could be to follow what the European Union (EU) enacted with its General Data Protection Regulation in 2018 7. To continue operating within the EU, websites were forced to comply with strict privacy and security laws. Multi-national organizations—whether they were based within or outside the EU—changed their infrastructure and adapted their websites to be allowed to reach European visitors. These structural changes ultimately proved to be beneficial to individuals at a global level, even if they were initially only intended for EU residents. Therefore, jurisdictional entities that regulate a significant portion of world-wide gambling operators, such as the United Kingdom or the EU as a whole, would be an optimal starting point for implementing PTS requirements. Given that operators may be licenced in some jurisdictions but not others, the use of a PTS would also prevent them from offering their services in jurisdictions where they are not licensed. Requiring documentation demonstrating the place of residence during registration would thus give governments access to the tools necessary to act, allowing them to hinder illegal operators' ability to reach out to people who reside outside the jurisdictions where they are licenced to operate. Using a PTS with electronic gaming machines (EGMs) would provide additional benefits. Not only has this form of gambling consistently been found to be associated with PG 8, but anonymous cash deposits can facilitate money laundering. Cash obtained through illegal activities is fed into an EGM, then quickly withdrawn as an alleged gambling win. A centralized deposit system would therefore help to counter this laundering scheme by keeping track of a person's true deposits and true wins. In conclusion, a centralized PTS can simultaneously improve the efficacy of harm-reduction measures and curtail illegal gambling-related practices. At the very least, a PTS should enforce self-exclusion, deposit limits and—in an increasingly digital gambling environment—require proof of residency. Complex PTS algorithms, which use more fine-grained information (e.g. frequency of deposits or account depletion) to detect people at risk for gambling harm 9, will be more difficult to implement at the universal level. The author received no financial support for the research or authorship of this article. Open access publishing facilitated by the University of Lethbridge, per the agreement between Wiley and the University of Lethbridge. The author has received consulting fees, unrelated to this work, from the social responsibility division of a provincial gambling operator (Crown Corporation) in Canada. Data sharing not applicable - no new data generated.