Wendy* could tell something was wrong by the look on her son’s girlfriend’s face when she came down to the kitchen on Easter morning. “He’d been out with his mates, had a few drinks, got her phone, got into her savings account, and gambled $2,800 into two bets,” she says.
Her son’s girlfriend burst into tears. “She said, ‘I never … thought he would steal from me.’”
Wendy’s 22-year-old son had started gambling just before he turned 18, when he was working as a landscape apprentice with a boss heavily into gambling.
His girlfriend has now left him and Wendy estimates that she and her husband have spent up to $25,000 paying off his gambling debts.
A Guardian Australia investigation into the youth gambling crisis…
