The research, which was commissioned by GambleAware, looked at the use of active betting accounts between July 2018 and June 2019. It is the first time this level of research has gone into online gambling.

Results show that a large majority of active gamblers actually spend little; these accounts were not used frequently across the year.

In total, 80% of betting accounts spent less than £200 ($277.80), while 90% of gaming accounts had a win/loss of less than £500.

However, a small portion of accounts were used considerably and suffered substantial losses. 60,000 betting accounts and 47,000 gaming accounts lost £5,000 or more in a year.

This minority made up a large amount of money retained by operators from customer stakes. Indeed, 5% of online accounts with high losses generated a minimum of 70% of operator gross gambling yield.

With gambling addiction a growing concern, the researchers also looked at what was being done by operators to help those incurring losses. They found that 4% received contact from an operator for the purpose of ‘social responsibility’.

36% of accounts that lost more than £2,000 a year received an email from an operator and 0.84% were phoned. Only 21.5% set deposit limits and 2.3% excluded themselves from their accounts.

Dr Sokratis Dinos from NatCen said: “This research was able to analyse and assess an unprecedented source of information. These interim findings are just the first stage and future research will provide a greater opportunity to understand the risk factors associated with gambling behaviour.”