When Charles Black roared round the country lanes of Yorkshire last week in his classic silver Aston Martin, it was the fulfilment of a lifelong dream.

A few days earlier, he had splashed out £125,000 to buy the 1964 DB5 — the James Bond model — from Jay Kay of the pop group Jamiroquai.

The Aston is one of two cars Black has bought recently. The 33-year-old, a barrister by training, has also bought a Ferrari 360 F1 as a runabout.

They are Black’s little indulgence after amassing £1m from his stake in Gaming Corporation, an internet gambling firm where he had been an executive director since it was set up in 2000.

Black is one of a growing breed of entrepreneurs to have made a fortune from the internet gambling boom. To date, 17 companies dedicated to online betting have floated in London, and their founders are sitting on paper fortunes worth a total of £5.3 billion.

Black got involved in the business, an internet portal that owns the Casino.co.uk and Gambling.com web addresses, after getting to know co-founder Jason Drummond. He had met Drummond while getting an internet service provider called Nasstar off the ground, but that was put on hold while Black concentrated on his work for Gaming Corporation.

After Gaming Corp completed a fundraising last March, four years after its float, Black decided to step down, to concentrate on Nasstar, which he may float this autumn. Even after selling part of his stake, he continues to hold almost 4m shares in Gaming Corp, enough to pay for more sports cars if he gets bored with the Ferrari.

The world’s internet gambling boom has allowed many entrepreneurs to fulfil their business ambitions and to indulge themselves — and others.

Noam Lanir, chief executive of Empire Online and son of a celebrated Israeli war hero, was reading his newspaper a few weeks ago when he saw a story about a concentration-camp survivor who had become ill and had been forced out of his home because he could not keep up the mortgage repayments.

Lanir called the bank and asked how much the man owed. It was more than $100,000. Take it from my account, ordered Lanir, who provided his bank details and ensured the man could move back home.

Lanir, whose stake in Empire is worth about £150m, is a serial entrepreneur, having made money from nightclubs and by bringing rollerblading to Tel Aviv. A trend-spotter, he was quick to see online gaming as the coming thing.

Equally swift off the block was Alistair Assheton, the co-founder and chief executive of VIP Gaming, an online bookmaker.

When a friend who was a software developer approached the former commodities trader about setting up a gaming business, they decided an internet bookie could be a winning proposition. “We thought a casino would never work because people wouldn’t trust a random number generator,” said Assheton.