The French gambling regulator, ARJEL, signed a one-year agreement with S.O.S. Joueurs to support its gambling addiction program. The agreement came about due to an increasing number of gambling addicts in France. A total of 79.5% of players are in some sort of gambling debt, and 4.3% of all players are considered financially bankrupt.
S.O.S. Joueurs is a French non-governmental organization that provides psychological counseling to addicted gamblers. The organization assigns social workers in situations when family issues are involved and offers legal support through lawyers specialized in this area. S.O.S. Joueurs and ARJEL will be responsible for taking over the gambling addiction project, although each company’s responsibility is still to be determined.
Online casinos in France already add up to 27.6% of the country’s gambling market; the rest of it is distributed among land-based casinos, underground gambling and sports-betting. During the past few months, ARJEL has been focused on improving its fiscal model partly due to the horse racing industry, which has grown over 9% since 2011 thanks to many illegal operators.
Suicide rates have also been on a rise among French gamblers, particularly among players engaged in illegal online casinos. This in turn has driven ARJEL and S.O.S. Joueurs to promote better gambling regulations on a national level by forcing transparency on casino operators.
In 2012, ARJEL reported that the total debt of addicted gamblers represented approximately 110 million in borrowed capital (credits, loans, mortgages, etc.), making the project a national concern in France.