PHIL STARTED STARTED BETTING ON SPORTS when he was just 18. Back then, in the mid-'90s, the only legal way to do it was with a pen and a paper slip from Proline, the sports-betting game offered by the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation. He filled out the slips at his corner store in London, Ontario. Phil says it never became a problem. (He agreed to speak with me if I used a pseudonym.) Instead, his finances fell apart for other reasons as he got older: vacations, overspending, a heavy drinking habit. Despite a full-time job as a sales representative for a food company, he fell deeper and deeper into debt and seemed to have no way to pay it off.

In 2022, he noticed that sports betting was everywhere. That April, the province had launched iGaming Ontario, Canada's first provincially regulated marketplace for private-sector, online sports-betting platforms. Phil was a fantasy football fan and, suddenly, when he researched players and teams on TSN and other sites, his screen was covered with ads for betting platforms like FanDuel and DraftKings. His friends, with whom he'd dabbled in sports betting, were all switching to the apps. It was more exciting. They could bet not just on wins and losses but all sorts of in-game happenings: the number of touchdowns or goals, how many catches a specific player got, a coin flip. They could also bet on obscure sports, like Ping-Pong. Over the next few months, they devoted more of their time and money to betting.

Some of them were making money, too. Desperate to pay down his debts, Phil downloaded FanDuel, thinking he could put his fantasy football expertise to use. "I knew the stats, so I thought, 'I can't lose,' " he says. It seemed easy. He'd seen Instagram reels by sports-betting influencers who posted their wins (though never their losses). He'd watch them complete challenges, like turning $10 into $10,000 in 10 days.

It didn't work. He kept losing money and, one day, he saw a tab at the bottom of the FanDuel app. It let him switch to casino mode, where the platform offered online versions of traditional casino games. There, he could see multiple roulette wheels all spinning at once. The enticement was too great to resist.

In September of 2023, Phil suffered a shoulder injury and went on a four-month paid leave from his job. Depressed, bored and $30,000 in debt, he gambled more to try to climb out of the hole. He cleared out his savings and his RRSPs. He borrowed $200 from a friend while waiting on a paycheque, swearing it was for bills. It wasn't--he gambled it away immediately. Phil paid his friend back, but lost their respect. He missed a payment on his mortgage and began using his line of credit to gamble. He kept that from his girlfriend--it was their mutual safety net.

Every day he sat on his phone, squinting, eyes going blurry. Night after night, he felt a pit...