A Circuit Court judge has warned parents to be aware of the ease with which children can open online betting accounts and become addicted to gambling on smartphones. “Bookies are not in the business of losing money,” Judge Rory MacCabe observed at the sentence hearing on Friday of 26-year-old former Galway county footballer Mark Hehir. Hehir pleaded guilty to the theft of €259,072 from his former employers Galway City Bin company over a six-month period in 2016, after initially becoming addicted to online gambling on his phone while in secondary school. “And it should be a red-light warning, particularly to parents, to keep an eye on their children, and to keep an eye to the risks associated with online gambling,” the judge said at Galway Circuit Criminal Court. He said Hehir had a gambling addiction and all of the money was being gambled with a number of different bookies, and mostly online.

Source: The Irish Times January 19, 2018 16:07 UTC