Edging your bets: Advantage play, gambling, crime and victimisation

Abstract

Consumerism, industrial development and regulatory liberalisation have underpinned the ascendance of gambling to a mainstream consumption practice. In particular, the online gambling environment has been marketed as a site of 'safe risks' where citizens can engage in a multitude of different forms of aleatory consumption. This paper offers a virtual ethnography of an online 'advantage play' subculture. It demonstrates how advantage players have reinterpreted the online gambling landscape as an environment saturated with crime and victimisation. In this virtual world, advantage play is no longer simply an instrumental act concerned with profit accumulation to finance consumer desires. Rather, it acts as an opportunity for individuals to engage in a unique form of edgework, whereby the threat to one's well-being is tested through an ability to avoid crime and victimisation. This paper demonstrates how mediated environments may act as sites for edgeworking and how the potential for victimisation can be something that is actively engaged with.

What’s Deviance Got to Do With It? Black Friday Sales, Violence and Hyper-conformity

“…This article does not claim to be the last word on the complexities of contemporary subjectivities and deviance, not least because the theoretical arguments made in this article are based on an extremely limited sample in only one city. However, read in the context of other theoretical and empirical accounts surrounding contemporary subjectivities, deviance and leisure (Banks, 2013;Hayward, 2004;Smith, 2014;Treadwell et al, 2013;Winlow and Hall, 2006), this article does suggest that the time has come for criminologists to begin to examine the deviance-leisure nexus more seriously and undertake more comprehensive theorisation of deviant motivation that is firmly and realistically situated within the broader political, socioeconomic and cultural context of neoliberal consumer capitalism (see Hall et al, 2008). To this end, we employ an understanding of deviant leisure that discards the Manichean binary of 'criminals' and 'moral citizens' in order to attempt to address the forces that can drive ostensibly law-abiding individuals towards harmful social practices.…”

The challenges of countering fraud in Malta’s remote gaming industry

“…While the manifold actual, possible and probable interconnections between gambling and crime have been well-established, the relationship between the two has altered significantly, as a consequence of the advent of the internet and the evolution of digital media and information communication technologies. In response, a small but developing body of academic literature has examined the interrelationships between online gambling and crime (McMullan and Rege, 2007, 2010, 2012; McMullan, 2012; Banks, 2012, 2013, 2014; Zerafa, 2016; Banks, 2017). Collectively, these studies demonstrate several crime threats and problems that may impact remote gambling operators, their customers and wider society.…”

A taxonomy of gambling-related crime

“…Moreover, criminological studies (McMullan and Rege 2007, 2010McMullan, 2012;Banks, 2013Banks, , 2014 have highlighted the multiplicity of ways in which gambling and crime intersect in online environments. Online gambling can operate as source of criminal activity, as a vehicle for crime or support for other criminal enterprise, with incidents of match fixing, distributed denial of service (DDoS) and cyberextortion, illegal and underage gambling, fraud, theft and money laundering having been identified by researchers.…”