Can one develop gambling addiction in less than a month, exclusively spending someone else's money? It's a behavioural addiction, not a chemical or even physical addiction.
I mean, it's defined by taking bigger and bigger risks to get a bigger and bigger thrill. He wasn't using his own money to start with. It's not like he ran out of his paycheck and started scrambling to find ways to get his fix. This person wasn't risking anything other than having his dad lie for him to the CBC in the first place.
Also, new theories on addiction is that they aren't actually related to the activity in the addiction itself, but to a absence within the individual's life in the first place. See:
https://www.ted.com/talks/johann_ha...you_know_about_addiction_is_wrong?language=en
Under such a theory, there would be no such thing as a predatory business practice, because no matter what they do to entice someone or create "addiction", it would be irrelevant in the face of the person's life position anyway.
One could argue it absolves the businesses of responsibility entirely. Almost as if arguing about psychology and predictive/descriptive behavioural science is sort of difficult to define absolutes in analogues in the first place.