The authors of the study said their findings highlighted the need for greater protections to prevent underage access to lottery games.
They claimed the study showed that the National Lottery’s online age-verification system is “vulnerable” and “fails to protect young people.”
The study by a team of researchers from UCC, Queen’s University in Belfast and the Technological University of the Shannon, Limerick, revealed that 55pc of fictitious accounts were verified by the National Lottery.
The study also found a statistically significant difference in outcomes between false accounts verified based on gender.
Almost 90pc of applications to register accounts with the National Lottery containing false ID documents submitted by females were verified compared to just 21pc of those by males.
Researchers said the findings might imply that males are subject to more stringent verification checks than females which was consistent with evidence that males are more likely to gamble before they are 18 as well as develop problem gambling.
They also pointed out that all accounts were created from the same IP address which might have impacted on verification outcomes and which would not fully reflect real-world conditions.
The study – whose findings are published in the academic journal, Epidemiology Biostatistics and Public Health – was designed to evaluate youth gambling protections operated by the National Lottery’s online age verification system against a background of the growing popularity of online gambling.
Adopting a “tiger team” approach, researchers created 60 test accounts split evenly between males and females with stereotypical Irish names such as Róisín Murphy and Tadgh Daly.
They generated unique e-mail accounts for each fictitious identity which were used together with fabricated addresses, dates of birth and phone numbers to register for online accounts with the National Lottery.
Counterfeit Irish passports and driving licences were also generated to simulate required government-issued photographic ID with publicly available headshots used as photographs.
The researchers claimed the use of deception was reasonable in psychological and social science research being conducted with the aim “to deliver a public good.”
Of the 60 accounts created by fictitious individuals, four were excluded due to technical issues. However, the remaining 56 accounts were successfully registered with 31 accounts with counterfeit IDs subsequently being verified by the National Lottery.
A total of 25 accounts were blocked at different stages of the registration process.
Nine accounts were blocked after submitting IDs for verification with another four blocked during the submission of ID documents and 12 blocked before the submission of ID documents.
One of the study’s main authors, Frank Houghton of TUS’s Department of Applied Social Sciences, said the study’s findings highlighted vulnerabilities in the National Lottery’s online age verification system which underscored the urgent need for more robust safeguards to prevent underage access.
The study noted that the National Lottery has expanded its digital products in recent years with sales from its online platforms totalling €132.2 million in 2023.
It also observed that the European School Survey Project on Alcohol and Other Drugs had found that 32pc of 15–16-year-olds in Ireland had gambled for money last year – up from 24pc in 2019 – while 16pc were engaging in lotteries on-site and a further 7pc online.
Dr Houghton said a research paper published by the Economic and Social Research Institute last year had also highlighted how there is evidence which showed that gambling before the age of 18 almost doubles the probability of developing problem gambling in adulthood.
Research commissioned by the Office of the Regulator of the National Lottery in 2024 found only 71pc of test purchases by 15–17-year-olds in 562 retail premises were challenged, despite the sale of lottery products being prohibited to anyone under 18.
Dr Houghton said evidence to date had demonstrated that test-purchasing of National Lottery products had identified significant weaknesses in face-to-face purchasing.
He added: “This research extends this finding into the online arena.”
The study recommended that the National Lottery Act should be amended to include a system of routine underage, test-purchasing checks with associated penalties and enforcement for breaches of the legislation.
However, the National Lottery said it had identified and blocked a total of 56 accounts at the time which it considered “suspicious in nature and using methods which we had not previously seen.”
A spokesperson for the company said its controls were able to identify these attempts through both manual and automatic checking, despite them being “sophisticated in nature and highly unusual.”
The spokesperson said the National Lottery had reached out to the authors of the report to request an opportunity to meet and discuss the matter further after it had become aware of the research.
Premier Lotteries Ireland, the operator of the National Lottery, said it was committed to ensuring its players were strictly over 18 years of age and its controls in place for ID verification were part of a wide range of player protection measures.
It added: “It is not possible to play our games online without age-verifying an account which needs to be supported by valid identification.”
