Millions of Americans are gambling with money they don’t have, according to a new VIP Grinders survey of 2,000 U.S. adult gamblers.
The survey found that one in four (25.4%) U.S. gamblers admitted to using a credit card to fund their bets. That equates to an estimated 30.9 million U.S. adults when extrapolated to the nation’s adult gambling population.
Meanwhile, one in six (16.6%) said they had borrowed money from friends or family to gamble, equivalent to about 20.2 million Americans.
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The survey also identified the states where gamblers were most likely to bet with borrowed money.
Mississippi ranked first, with gamblers in the state reporting some of the biggest single-session losses, averaging $9,744. Nearly half (45.5%) said they had used credit to fund their gambling, while the same share said they had turned to debt to bankroll their bets.
Louisiana ranked second. The state had the highest share of gamblers in the ranking who reported using a credit card to fund their bets, at 38.2%, while more than one in three (35.3%) said they had turned to debt. One in five Louisiana gamblers (20.6%) also said they had borrowed money from friends or family to continue gambling.
Texas ranked third. About two in five (41.8%) gamblers in the state said they had used debt to fund their gambling, while 28.8% had put their bets on a credit card and nearly one in four (24.8%) had borrowed from friends or family to continue wagering.
Texas also had the highest credit card delinquency rate among the top 15 states, at 11.2%, meaning roughly one in nine credit card accounts had an overdue payment.
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“The states that come up when people think of gambling problems are not always the states where gambling is quietly being paid for on borrowed money. Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas and Oregon all show far higher rates of gamblers using credit cards, debt or family loans to keep playing than states like Nevada or Arizona, even though those two tend to get most of the attention,” said Joao Mourato, head of product at VIP Grinders.
“That matters because funding gambling through credit is a pattern that can quietly build into a much larger and harder-to-see debt problem. When we paired our survey data with real credit card delinquency figures, several of these same states stood out there too, which suggests the credit-funded gambling we are seeing in the survey isn’t an isolated behavior.”