New Dutch gamblers sign up on birthday

• The Kansspelautoriteit (Ksa) has published three studies examining gambling behaviour among minors and young adults in the Netherlands.
• 41% of new accounts among 18-24 year olds belong to 18-year-olds, many opened on or near their birthday, with casino games the most common entry point.
• Among MBO vocational students, 28% of underage respondents say they gambled in the past year, mostly through physical products such as scratch cards.

The Kansspelautoriteit (Ksa) has published findings from three studies into gambling behaviour among minors and young adults, warning that gambling appears to have become strongly normalised in Dutch society.

The research covers account activity among 18-24 year olds in their first three months with a licensed operator, gambling among MBO vocational students, and the routes by which minors first encounter gambling.

Birthday rush to bet

The first study tracked account activity among newly registered players aged 18 to 24 at licensed operators. It found 41% of new accounts in that age bracket belonged to 18-year-olds, many opened on or shortly after their eighteenth birthday.

Those youngest players staked the least money of the cohort on average. That’s a notable departure from the regulator’s earlier work, which flagged sports betting as the usual gateway into other products. This time, casino games came out as the more common starting point for young adults.

The Ksa tied the pattern to broader normalisation: gambling’s growing presence in everyday life appears to smooth the path into online play the moment someone turns eighteen. The finding sits alongside the regulator’s other efforts to police how operators target young adults through digital advertising.

How minors get in

A second, qualitative study run by Youngworks on the Ksa’s behalf mapped how young people encounter gambling before they’re legally allowed to. Many children come into contact with it well before 18, usually through legal products that reach them by workaround since these products are restricted to adults.

Parents buying a scratch card for a child, or older friends and relatives sharing a betting account with someone underage, were the routes cited most often. At that age, gambling tends to happen in a group and gets read as harmless: a poker night with friends, a shared bet on a match.

There’s a useful signal buried in the data too. Many young people already treat solo gambling and use of unlicensed operators as red flags for problem behaviour, even if they don’t apply the same caution to gambling with peers.

Physical products, real numbers

The third study looked at gambling and gambling harm among MBO vocational students. 68% of respondents said they don’t gamble at all, but 28% of underage students reported having gambled in the past year.

Scratch cards, bingo and slot machines were the formats named most, and it’s physical gambling products rather than online ones driving that exposure, a different risk profile to the account-opening data from the first study.

Put together, the three pieces of research point to a consistent story: exposure starts young, runs through legal products supplied physically, and isn’t treated as risky within some young people’s social circles. The Ksa says it will now work out what further measures are needed, building on work already underway with the Dutch government under its multi-year agenda on preventing gambling-related harm.

Beyond age verification

This lands at a point when Dutch enforcement is already tightening on multiple fronts, from Cruks exclusion gaps at licensed platforms to a channelisation rate the regulator itself calls too low.

What’s different here is the target. Age verification at sign-up doesn’t touch a 15-year-old playing a shared account or a scratch card bought by a parent. Operators serving the Dutch market are being pushed to think about duty of care as something that starts before a player ever opens an account, not after.