The practice session of college student Greg Hogan was abruptly put to an end when police arrived to arrest him for robbing an Allentown bank. Hogan, who at the time of his arrest, was practicing on his cello at the Zoellner Arts Center for the Lehigh University Philharmonic, was taken away in handcuffs in front of dozens of his classmates, family members, and friends. As the sophomore class president and son of a Baptist minister, most would find it surprising that Hogan has been arrested for a crime, but Edward Looney, director of the Council on Compulsive Gambling of New Jersey, doesn’t find it surprising at all. According to Looney, even though Hogan doesn’t fit the typical profile of a bank robbery suspect, his intelligence and competitive nature do make him the type of college student that might fall victim to Internet gambling debt and then use crime as a way out of that debt. With today’s technology, many people, including college students, who could never have set foot in a casino before, now have access to hundreds of Internet casinos with no limits on how much they can bet other than their credit card limits. Often, this adds up to thousands of dollars, and the fun and excitement of playing are too much of a lure for students to resist. As a result, some students resort to criminal activities to support their habit. According to PokerPulse.com, an online service that tracks online poker worldwide, more than 1.8 million people play online poker each month, wagering an average of $200 million a day. A great deal of that is occurring on U.S. college campuses, Looney said. ''Gambling on college campuses is epidemic, and Internet gambling is probably the fastest-growing type of campus gambling,'' Looney said. ''You give me one hour on any campus and I'll find an active game or a kid who can't stay off his computer. It's verging on crisis, and really, we're just getting started.'' Hogan’s background (a 19-year-old finance and accounting major who graduated from a $19,000-a-year private high school) seems to defy the typically held notion of a bank robber and yet his lawyer said that Hogan robbed a Wachovia bank on December 9 to get money to pay off the $5,000 in debt he built by playing online poker. Hogan’s case has drawn a great deal of attention precisely because of his affluent background, but, in reality, the profile of most of the college students found to be susceptible to online gambling troubles matches Hogan’s profile. According to a database built by the Council on Compulsive Gambling in New Jersey, roughly ninety percent of college gamblers are men and, of those, the typical compulsive gambler is a competitive, intelligent, high-energy student with good grades, who is popular with his peers, has a talent for math and works a part-time job. While the phenomenon of problem online gambling on college campuses is still relatively rare, Looney predicts that it is only a matter of time that the phenomenon becomes a common occurrence. For now, though, the problem has sparked enough interest to draw the interest of several talk shows, including Good Morning America, the Today Show and the Oprah Winfrey Show. Hogan’s family members and close friends, including his Sigma Phi Epsilon brothers and his orchestra colleagues, have refrained from commenting about him, but his story continues to garner national attention. Hogan, who is employed part-time at the University Chaplain’s office under a work-study program, also served as class president and played second-chair cello for the university orchestra. Studies and statistical information on college gambling are hard to come by because the problem is relatively new, which makes it difficult to track the popularity of the activity, but the Council on Compulsive Gambling reports taking more than 20,000 calls a year, including more than 4,000 from what Looney considers addicted gamblers. More than 80 percent of those 4,000 said they have committed crimes to fund their gambling habit and 78 percent of them said overwhelming debt has caused them to consider suicide, Looney said. Hogan’s case is not the only Internet gambling problem on the campus either. A parent of another Lehigh student, speaking on conditions of anonymity, said that his son, a 21-year-old student athlete, had to leave school the previous year after running up a gambling debt in the tens of thousands of dollars. The student’s father noted that most of his son’s losses came from sports betting with a local bookie, but many of the boy’s friends bet online. ''The pressure is greatest on athletes and the college is ill-equipped to handle it,'' the father said Thursday. ''Greg Hogan's debt is relatively small compared to some of these kids.'' Officials at Lehigh University said that students there agree to a code of conduct when using campus computers but the school cannot monitor the use of personal computers. If a student does notice that he has a gambling problem, however, university counselors are available for help, said Dina Silver, university spokeswoman. ''We don't have any evidence that gambling is a problem on campus,'' Silver said. ''That recognized, we realize that student gambling is a growing problem nationwide.'' The New Jersey surveys appear to show that the problem of Internet gambling is growing rapidly. While only one percent of the compulsive gamblers surveyed in 2000 said they used the Internet to gamble, by 2004, the number had risen to 8 percent. Posted on: December 21, 2005
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