A study of 4,752 customers targeted for care calls by Norsk Tipping between 2022 and 2024 found that 43.7% reduced their loss limits during the conversation, and 12.6% opted for self-exclusion. Another 0.7% took a temporary break from gambling.

Those are outcomes from a phone call. Not a regulation, not a product change, not an advertising restriction. Someone rang, and in more than half of completed calls the player changed something about how they gamble.

What a Care Call Actually Is

Norway’s state monopoly has been making these calls since 2015. Customers are flagged by risk-assessment tools, Playscan and more recently Spillepuls, on triggers including large losses within particular age brackets, heavy losses among new players, and persistent high-risk status. Trained staff then make up to three attempts to reach them and use motivational interviewing rather than a script of warnings.

The contact rate matters as much as the outcome. Of those targeted, 68.2% answered at least one call and 57.3% completed a successful conversation. A harm-reduction measure that reaches well over half its intended audience is doing better than most.

Researchers compared the twelve weeks before the call attempts with the twelve weeks after, and found reductions in days gambled, total wagers, net losses and theoretical loss. The effects were described as small to moderate but consistent. The work was published in an American Psychological Association journal.

Who Responds Best

The breakdown is more useful than the headline. Loss-limit reductions were more common among customers who had referred themselves, at 60.7%, and among younger players. Customers flagged by the Spillepuls tool showed stronger effects than the rest of the sample.

Self-referral doing best is not a surprise, and it is not a reason to discount the finding. It tells operators where the cheap wins are. Someone who has already raised a hand is far more likely to accept a lower limit when it is offered, which means the tooling that lets a player flag themselves is doing quiet work long before anyone picks up a phone.

The younger-player result cuts against the usual assumption that direct contact bounces off that group.

What the Study Cannot Show

It is worth being precise about what the study measured, because harm-reduction research is frequently oversold. This compared a player’s own behaviour in the twelve weeks before and after a call attempt. It is not a randomised trial against an untreated control group, so it cannot fully separate the effect of the call from whatever was already happening to a player flagged for unusually heavy losses. Some of that decline might have come anyway.

Small and Consistent Beats Big and Theoretical

Set this against the direction of policy elsewhere in Europe. The Netherlands is preparing a near-total advertising ban whose evidence base is contested by the lawyers who work in the market. Several jurisdictions have reached for blanket restrictions whose effect on actual gambling behaviour is difficult to measure and easy to argue about.

A care call is the opposite kind of intervention to the design choices that keep people playing. Narrow, targeted at players an operator has already identified as at risk, measurable against that player’s own behaviour before and after, and cheap enough to run at a scale of thousands.

The Monopoly Advantage

“Small to moderate but consistent” is not a headline. It is, however, a result you can actually attribute to the thing you did, which is more than most gambling harm policy can claim. The obvious limitation is that a state monopoly can run this without worrying that a competitor will pick up the customer it just talked into a lower limit. In a competitive market, the operator making the call carries the cost and a rival collects the benefit.

That is the argument for making care calls a licence condition rather than a virtue.