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The Daily Beast on Monday reported that the nation of Italy has a billion dollar gambling epidemic, no doubt fueled by the recent explosion of regulated Internet poker.
The article itself doesn’t make mention of Web gambling, instead honing in on the ever growing number of slot parlors and scratch-card lotteries.
“Italy is becoming the wild west of gambling nations,” Matteo Iori, president of Coordinamento Nazionale Gruppi Per Giocatori d’Azzardo, an umbrella organization that help gambling addicts, told the Daily Beast. “Because Italians are burdened with an economic crisis, that has paradoxically stimulated many to seek fortune to escape the economic difficulty.”
More than 800,000 Italians have a serious gambling dependency, according to the association Libera.
Italy has the largest per-capita gambling expenditure in Europe and the third largest in the world.
The government itself has plenty of incentive to promote gambling. The Italian state made more than $8 billion in gambling tax revenues in 2012 and the industry is growing fast. Gambling revenues amounted to a staggering $120 billion last year.
- Aaron Goldstein, Gambling911.com
