According to statistics gathered by Ofcom, since the passage of the 2005 Gambling Act, television gambling ads have grown by 1,443 percent. The eight-year-old law allowed gambling operators to advertise widely on TV, for the first time, and sponsor sporting events. In 2005, there were approximately 90,000 but this figure has grown to over 1.38 million by 2012, which was an increase of 14-fold. Last year, over one third of the advertisements were for bingo at 38.3 percent, 29.6 percent were for online casino and poker, while lottery and scratch card ads accounted for 25.6 percent of total television gambling…