Pink Elephants

What is Pink Elephants?

The win completely changed his relationship with gambling. In Madsen’s words: “That jackpot was really the beginning of my gambling addiction.”  It was an addiction that was propelled by a constant exposure to illegal sites, he explains.

The cycle eventually became extreme.

“At one point, I had only a few thousand euros left to gamble with, but then I won €180,000 in a single day. The next day I lost it all again,” he says.

About Pink Elephants

A customer might buy a team at 55 or 56 cents expecting the price to rise to 58 or 59 cents, he explains. If it falls to 45 cents instead, the trader may refuse to accept the loss and continue holding the position.

“People will lose money faster on exchanges for lots of reasons,” Marantelli says. “It inherently increases spend, volatility, lots of things. And you’re playing against a sharper audience than you’re playing against at the DraftKings sportsbook.”

He compares the effect with sportsbook cash-out features, which gave customers more apparent control over their bets but may also have encouraged greater spending. The crucial difference is that an exchange customer can be facing a specialist whose entire business is identifying inaccurately priced contracts.

How to play Pink Elephants

The report utilised various methods to estimate the size and scale of Europe’s black market, including web traffic, digital marketing, macros data and regulations in place across the 28 markets surveyed.

Helios, a specialist consultant in gambling web traffic, analysed the number of black market websites actively marketing across the 28 markets included in the report, between March and May.

This data was cross referenced with SimilarWeb traffic analysis to confirm the scale of activity. In some markets, the number of illegal sites being actively marketed was much higher than those that have local licences to operate.