Ask any parent or teacher and they will tell you children play a lot of online games, including Fortnite which has taken the world by storm. What they might not know is that these games allow children to gamble quite openly - just without money.

This is all legal because of a loophole. And at the same time, whether on tablets or phones, children are bombarded with ads which make gambling sound like harmless fun.

The combined effect of these two factors is that, like Pavlov’s Dogs, a generation of children are being conditioned to gamble.

Our current legislation allows such games as they fall outside the provisions of the Gambling Act 2005 as they do not offer monetary prizes.

This means internet companies can label these apps ‘age appropriate’ when they’re really nothing of the sort. Even apps which mimic slot machines and promise users ‘the Vegas casino thrill anytime, anywhere’ are accessible to children.

Young users do not just learn the technicalities of gambling games like slot machines but they are subconsciously learning the habit of soliciting thrills through these games.

New research from the UK Gambling Commission’s found that more than 370,000 young people aged 11 to 16 years old are already gambling weekly. It discovered that about 25,000 children are addicted to gambling or suffer from a gambling-related condition, and believes that as many as a further 36,000 are at risk of becoming addicted.