LOVE Island star Scott Thomas has admitted he wasted £20,000 during his gambling addiction and used to pinch £20 notes from his nan’s handbag.
The entrepreneur, 32, used to wait outside the bookies at 8am to try to win his money back after splurging his student loan at casinos the night before.
Speaking on his podcast Mancs on the Mic, with brothers Adam and Ryan, Scott said: When I was a student, I had a really bad gambling problem.
“It really got hold of me, and no one knew how bad it was. I was going out after student nights and ending up in a casino, losing thousands of pounds of my student loan and everything else.
“The next day I would wake up at eight in the morning and wait outside the bookies on my own to try to win it back.
“It was so bad. I couldn’t tell anyone how bad it was at first. You guys just thought it was after nights out.
“I remember waiting outside casinos on my own. It feels like such a different chapter in my life.
“This is a secret. I’ve never told anyone this, but I remember being around at my nan’s, and I remember being that desperate that I was checking her old handbags for £20s and stuff like that.
“It was so bad. I was about 20-years-old or something like that.”
Ex-Coronation Street actor Ryan recalled seeing Scott using his £20,000 inheritance money from his grandma to pay off his debts.
He said: “I remember driving through Cheadle village the day we all got our inheritance, and I saw you going around the village giving out cash to people you’d borrowed money off.
“I watched you in the car giving money to someone you owed to. It was really upsetting me.”
And touching on his own issues, Ryan told his brothers for the first time about his own Gamblers Anonymous visits five years ago with a friend.
He said: “We didn’t have a problem, but we felt something wasn’t right. We wanted to tap into that as well.
“We put it off for a while. I feel like we’ve all got very addictive personalities.
“It was only when I was drinking and I felt like it was just getting excessive, and I was doing it when I was bored, and doing it on the iPhone.”
