Yes. People like that are adept at making you feel for them.

Well if you are winning money, you need to keep going as to not waste your lucky streak. If you are losing, you need to double down to win back what you lost. You need to keep going, as long as you do, the loses are not real, you can still turn it around. You need to play one more game. One more. You don't want to face she consequences of your action, you are in too deep. Your life will be ruined. There is no escape. It is to late to stop anyway, might as well keep playing.

Many people don't understand how serious gambling addictions is. It destroys families. I can be as bad as any drug related addiction if not worse.

Though that was just one guess. There are many money sinks. Porn, gacha games and so on.

About twenty years ago there was a story in Melbourne, of a young foreign student at the casino.

He withdrew $1,000 from the ATM from his home back in Asia. Was duly given the cash. He noticed though, that looking at online banking, his balance hadn't changed. Odd, but maybe it was a vagary of international transactions (and again, 20+ years ago).

Nope. So he took out another $1,000. And another. Every time, got the money, no transaction posted.

Not just one ATM, any.

Over the course of 2 years when it all came out, he had gotten $2M+ from this.

Know how he got caught? He took some of that money gambling. And sat at a table all night, constantly replenishing his stash. That tipped off the casino that something was odd, because they had loaded the ATM with $250K, which usually lasted ~48h, but he emptied out in a few. "Didn't we fill this this afternoon?".

Once they got the financial institutions it was also fairly quickly revealed.

And in court, the local banks admitted that there had been nothing flagged in their system, and presumably it would have kept working until (at least) his card expired.

There you have a literal money printing machine, and "No, let's see what I can win gambling". I suppose here's other factors like "Maybe it's easier to launder a big winning" but nonetheless, it actually appeared more that he was just addicted to gambling.