Revenue from igaming in November amounted to $987,423, down 0.9% from $987,423 last year and 17.6% behind $1.2m in October. The monthly figure was also the lowest since the $843,247 generated in February this year.
Of this total, $803,671 came from video lottery games, with $149,443 generated by internet table games and the remaining $34,319 from poker rake and fees.
BetMGM said it believed the breach occurred in May of this year, though it only became aware of it last month.
The breach allowed unauthorised personnel to see “personal information of some patrons such as name, contact information (such as postal address, email address and telephone number), date of birth, hashed Social Security number, account identifiers (such as player ID and screen name) and information related to transactions with BetMGM”.
However, the business said it had no reason to think that patron passwords or account funds were accessed.
“BetMGM is coordinating with law enforcement and taking steps to further enhance its security,” the operator said. “BetMGM recommends patrons remain alert for any suspicious activity or unsolicited communications regarding their personal information.”
In order to protect customers against potential scams using their data, the operator has offered affected patrons credit monitoring and identity restoration services for two years free of charge.
Adam Greenblatt, CEO of BetMGM, added that data security was a priority for the business.
“We are taking this matter very seriously and are working quickly to investigate it,” he said. The security of our platform and our patrons’ data is a top priority for BetMGM. We regret any inconvenience this may cause.”
Last month, rival US operator DraftKings revealed that a mass hacking of DraftKings customer accounts led to the loss of $300,000 (£252,745/€291,742) in funds.
The DCMS Select Committee is made up of 11 MPs – between the Conservative party, Labour Party, Scottish National Party and independents – that scrutinises the work of the DCMS as well as its associated bodies.
Today, the committee launched an inquiry into “the government’s approach to the regulation of gambling”.
“The DCMS Committee inquiry will be investigating the progress the government has made in addressing the issues raised by parliament, how to ensure regulation can keep up with innovations in online gambling and the links between gambling and broadcasting and sport,” the committee said.
It added that its inquiry was prompted by “warnings that more needs to be done to protect people, including children, from gambling-related harm”.
The inquiry is currently open for evidence, and will be until 10 February, 2023.
It was announced with the government expected to publish the Gambling Act white paper, part of the Gambling Act review, early next year. The document – which will set out the government’s plans for reform – was originally expected more than a year ago after the review began in 2020, but it has faced various delays – mostly related to changes of personnel in government and the Gambling Commission.
Industry trade body the Betting and Gaming Council (BGC) welcomed the inquiry.
It said that the inquiry would be a “further opportunity for the regulated industry to show our continued commitment to raising standards in safer gambling and to demonstrating our support for the UK economy”.
BGC chair Michael Dugher said he hoped the committee would produce a balanced inquiry that recommends measures targeted towards the vulnerable, rather than impacting all bettors.
“As the standards body for much of the regulated industry, we strongly welcome this inquiry announced today as a further opportunity for the regulated sector to show our continued commitment to raising standards in safer gambling,” he said.
“I am sure that the committee’s inquiry, like the government’s gambling review, will be genuinely ‘evidence-led’ and has to strike a careful balance in making recommendations that are about protecting the vulnerable, whilst not unfairly impacting on the millions of customers who bet perfectly safely and responsibly.”
Dugher also noted the black market, as well as the economic impact of the regulated betting industry, in his response to the inquiry being announced..
“Problem gambling may be low by international standards at 0.3%, but one problem gambler is one too many. So we look forward to hearing from the committee about what more can be done. We must also ensure that they do not drive people to the unsafe, unregulated black market online, where there aren’t any safeguards to protect vulnerable people.
“On behalf of over 110,000 people whose jobs depend on the regulated betting and gaming industry, we also look forward to setting out the contribution industry to the UK economy and our commitment to further investment”.
According to law, authorities may block payments to operators that are found to be targeting the Swedish market without a licence.
However, in practice, payment blocking has not been used as a tool in the fight against unlicensed gambling, as this involves a long process settled through the courts.
The new law, though, will require payment providers to “provide information that is used in the transmission of bets or winnings or from a gambling operation without the necessary licence” when it is needed to facilitate payment blocking.
The law also says that regulator Spelinspektionen may also conduct “test purchases” of gambling products, allowing it to ensure that operators are following Swedish laws, and ensure that they are not targeting Sweden without a licence.
In addition, the law includes more power for authorities to fight match fixing. The Swedish National Sports Confederation and affiliated sporting bodies may now process personal data collected by gambling licensees, in order to deal with potential match-fixing offences.
Gambling operators are also required under the law to hand over information that is needed for an investigation into crimes in connection with gambling if asked to do so.
The law has been in the works for more than a year, as Sweden has continued to try to tackle unlicensed gambling.
An original proposal for the bill included an amendment to the scope of the country’s Gambling Act, which would make it apply to all gambling available in Sweden, rather than all gambling targeting Sweden. This change would have allowed authorities to crack down on any operators without a licence that did not block Swedish customers.
However, the government decided in June not to go ahead with this part of the law, after courts and the Public Prosecutor’s Office raised questions about the degree to which it could be enforced.
As part of its efforts to tackle illegal gambling, Sweden is also set to require B2B online gambling suppliers to obtain permits to do business with licensed operators. This, the government hopes, will reduce illegal gambling in the country, as suppliers that offer their services to operators targeting the Swedish market could have their permits revoked.
Gustaf Hoffstedt, secretary-general of Swedish trade association Branscheförenigen för Onlinespel (BOS), said the industry supports the B2B permit system, but feels Spelinspektionen’s expectations of how useful they will be in tackling illegal gambling may be too high.
In October, Ladbrokes posted a promoted tweet including the text, “Can these big summer signings make the question marks over their performances go away?” and a video reel of Premier League footballers Philippe Coutinho, Jesse Lingard and Kalidou Koulibaly.
However, the ASA challenged whether the ad broke its recently introduced rules about gambling marketing messages with “strong appeal” to children.
Previously, the standard for gambling advertisements was whether they had “particular appeal” to children. Under this standard, what mattered was whether an ad’s appeal to children was disproportionate compared to its appeal to adults.
However, earlier this year, the Committee of Advertising Practice and the ASA brought in a new code, in which gambling ads may not have “strong appeal” to children.
Under this standard, ads that would appeal to a large number of children would be banned, regardless of their appeal to adults.
Because of other existing rules around gambling ads, the new rules mostly affected how celebrities may appear in marketing messages. Guidance for the new standard notes that Premier League footballers were generally not permitted to feature in gambling ads, though there are exceptions if the audience could be limited to those over 18.
Ladbrokes said it had “carefully incorporated” the new guidance. As top-flight footballers were “considered to carry a high risk of having strong appeal to children”, it “made use of all available targeting and age-gating tools” to ensure the ad could only be viewed by those aged 18 or older.
In particular, it noted that the Ladbrokes Twitter feed was only accessible to users who had entered their age as 18 or older.
In addition, it said that – because there was no independent age verification on Twitter – it also only targeted the ad to users aged 25 or older.
Data from Twitter showed that the ad received 50,666 impressions, with 0% of their targeted audience being recorded as under 20 years old.
However, the ASA upheld the complaint.
It noted that Premier League footballers may be permitted on an ad that was more effectively age-gated, but it said that Twitter’s age verification process was not strong enough for the Ladbroke ad to be allowed.
“We considered that it would have been acceptable for the ad to appear in a medium where under-18s, for all intents and purposes, could be entirely excluded from the audience,” the ASA said. “That would apply in circumstances where those who saw the ad had been robustly age-verified as being 18 or older, such as through marketing lists that had been validated by payment data or credit checking.
“We did not consider that marketing data inferred from user behaviour met that threshold.”
It said that it did not believe Twitter met the thresholds for reliable age-verification, as users verify their own ages.
“Because Twitter was a media environment where users self-verified on customer sign-up, and did not use robust age-verification, we considered that Ladbrokes had not excluded under-18s from the audience with the highest level of accuracy required for ads the content of which was likely to appeal strongly to under-18s,” it said.
The KSA did not disclose the identity of either operator, but the Dutch regulator did say that one provider complied immediately and withdrew its programme, while the other had to be persuaded with a threat to take regulatory action before agreeing to close its scheme.
Both providers offered the loyalty programmes on their respective websites to all players, including young adults. Such schemes and initiatives are classed as advertising in the Netherlands and therefore should not be targeted at young adults, with this having prompted the regulator to contact each of the licensed operators about their activities.
The KSA noted that while neither programme paid out any saved balances, they still offered users the opportunity to save. This, the Dutch regulator said, was also classed as an advertising activity in the country and therefore should not be aimed at young adults.
“The KSA closely monitors that providers do not target advertising activities, such as loyalty programs, at young adults,” the regulator said. “If providers do so anyway, they risk enforcement action by the KSA.”
The latest warnings come after KSA chair René Jansen last week revealed that the regulator had launched an investigation into operators it believes are failing to implement duty of care for their players.
Speaking at the 2022 Amsterdam Gambling & Awareness Congress 2022, Jansen said the regulator was working to bring in mandatory maximum limits on gambling spend, a topic he had discussed before.
Currently, players are required to set a deposit limit, but there is not a specific maximum, allowing for the option to set a very high limit.
On top of this, Jansen added that he felt a number of Dutch-licensed operators had failed in their duty of care to their customers. As a result, he said the regulator had launched a “broad investigation” into how operators implement their duty of care.
The deal was agreed in December of last year and closed following approval from the Nevada Gaming Commission, with Hard Rock assuming control of the venue at 6am local Las Vegas time yesterday (December 19).
The 3,044-room casino resort will continue to operate as the Mirage Hotel & Casino until the renovation and rebranding of the property to the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino Las Vegas is complete.
Under the agreement, CDI would purchase all the outstanding equity interests of Exacta Systems, which provides technology for machines made by suppliers such as AGS, IGT, Light & Wonder, Everi, Konami and Incredible Technologies.
Historical horse racing machines allow players to play a slot-like game based on horse racing results. These machines are permitted in some states in which betting on horse racing is legal but traditional slot machines are not.
In almost every part of the world, the online betting experience has been heavily shaped by what retail betting looked like. So to understand the online betting experience in South Africa, you have to know something about retail betting in South Africa.
“I’ve traveled the world and seen betting shops around the world but I don’t think I’ve ever seen betting shops of the size I’ve seen in South Africa,” Kiron Interactive chief executive Stephen Spartinos says. “You’ve got betting shops of the size of a Wal-Mart and you’ve got 100 cashiers.
“You walk into these shops and you talk about two, three floors. At any time you could have 2,000-3000 punters in your shop.”
But it’s not simply the size that makes South African betting shops stand out. Betting shops in the country are able to be so large partly because the betting experience is markedly different from a country like the UK.
“South Africans love to place a bet on a soccer match and then they sit in the bookmakers and watch the soccer match and there’ll be food served,” BetGames sales director for Africa James Everett says. “It’s almost like a restaurant with a bookmaker attached.
“It’s really different from walking into a betting shop in the UK, where you walk in, place a bet and walk out. Here you watch the match, have a few drinks with your mates and have some bets on, maybe play some games at half time.”
Yet while experience is king in retail, it appears much more difficult to find a true experience around online sports betting in the country.
Many operators use either old technology or solutions from suppliers with less resources available to them.
“Operators in South Africa haven’t necessarily been able to work with many of the tier-one suppliers or the European suppliers purely down to the cost,” Amelco business development manager Brandon Walker notes.
“Some of the traditional operators in the space, they’re either using their own in-house tech or bits and pieces from how they’ve evolved over the last ten or 15 years.
“So that is to say it’s weak. I think it’s just that the market hasn’t really had the opportunity to have many top suppliers come into the space.”
Why is the cost so high for many suppliers? Some of that is exchange rates, but a further factor is South Africa’s complex regulatory system.
With all products having to go through a long certification process, it makes sense that some suppliers determined that it simply wasn’t worth it for them to spend the time and money to get into the market.
“It is quite a long process as well to get your software certified in South Africa,” Walker says. “It’s not some easy process”
Spartinos says the regulatory hurdles are a major factor keeping some suppliers out of the market.
“A lot of international suppliers say, ‘Oh, South Africa has opened up, let’s jump in’. But it’s not that simple,” he says.
“We got licensed a few years ago and I’d still say the USA takes the cake for the longest licensing process, but South Africa has a lot to go through.”
Mobile data costs can be a challenge as well, limiting the effectiveness of any features heavy on data, such as streaming.
“If you’re watching a stream, that uses quite a bit of data and the data charges are more expensive in Africa because the infrastructure is very new,” Everett says.
But one thing that has changed the dynamic recently is the rise of online casino-style gaming, permitted as a type of fixed-odds bet, provided the products meet certain requirements.
With a new stream of revenue, the market is more lucrative, and therefore more appealing to suppliers looking to make an entry.
“Without the growth of live games and slots, the value of the sports betting market alone just wasn’t enough to grab the attention of some of the big boys from Europe,” LulaBet managing director Iain Gutteridge says. “And obviously the explosion of the American market has grabbed the attention of some of them and pulled them away from these markets.
“But South Africa is back on the agenda now and deserves a complete look with slots and full online casino. On a straight sports proposition it would have been more difficult to justify. The potential gains to be made in South Africa are now clear to see – in the year ending March 2019, total betting – including casino-type products – was a SAR7bn industry, with that figure more than doubling to SAR15bn for the year ending March 2022.”
And with a questionable standard of product so far, there could be an opportunity for a new entrant to try to stand out in this area as the first to offer a modern betting product. That is the proposition that upstart operator LulaBet is hoping for, using Amelco’s technology to power its offering.
The operator has leaned into that angle so far, with Gutteridge describing the brand as “One of South Africa’s first true tier-one platform and sportsbooks” at launch. He’s also willing to speak frankly about what he sees as the low quality of his competitors’ products.
“Due to the difficulty of getting into the market, getting certified and regulated, there are very few tier–one operators in this space,” he says. “There are a lot of Eastern European tier-two operators that will struggle over time, as the player base learns to expect the best tech-driven experience.
“And two of the legacy big players have extremely dated software. This is a great opportunity for LulaBet and Amelco to bring our property and platform into the space and get it going.”
To Gutteridge, Amelco was the perfect option to supply that technology, partly because the business had experience within Africa.
“Amelco have been looking for the right partner to enter South Africa for a long time and a lot of people have been talking to Amelco,” he says. “Now that the first rush in the US is over, the timing is absolutely right. And I think that we represented the right mix of very strong local backing with what is an extremely experienced team.
“It’s just a match made in heaven. I think their product is amazing. It’s very Africa-centric with their experience of being in Nigeria among other markets, and I think we’re going to do very well in this space.”
It’s easy for Gutteridge to say, but Spartinos also says that he has been very impressed with the new operator’s product from what he has seen.
“Any operator of a particular size is a client of Kiron’s but we’ve been very impressed by that business and just using the Amelco platform,” he says. “It’s a very strong proposition.
“A lot of what we’ve seen them bring to the market is in our opinion quite ground-breaking.”
But – like how online products are often built to emulate what players found in retail – customers can prefer the familiar. If the South African customer has been exposed to subpar sportsbook products for years, is there a risk that players will simply be too used to the old way of doing things to want to try something new?
Gutteridge notes that this problem has already plagued one local operator, which he says had been unable to migrate its customers as they became used to its old platform.
Walker, meanwhile, acknowledges that he doesn’t expect every punter in the country to switch right away.
“I think there are a lot of loyal players in South Africa who are very loyal to the old brands and people are obviously familiar with those products,” Walker says.
“I do think, give it a few years when there are more of these tier-one suppliers in the space, obviously including ourselves, and we provide a more robust and better solution. It’s always going to be down to the operator and their marketing, customer acquisition and retention.
So what is that marketing? It involves a mix of marketing on brand and marketing on elements of the platform.
“The proposition is an extremely locally centric brand,” Gutteridge says. “All of our brand messaging is very localised, it resonates very well with the younger culture.
“And we offer an extremely fast seamless registration and automated seamless payments and that’s something that a lot of operators don’t do.”
With leading operators such as Betway and HollywoodBets taking up a large chunk of the market, making inroads isn’t easy. But Kiron’s Spartinos thinks the operator has a path to winning significant market share of its own.
“In terms of marketing and having access to databases, it’s very difficult,” says. “You’ve got a couple of operators in the space that do really dominate, so you need to come into the market with something unique to have a meaningful entry.
“And I think they stand out as offering something really good.”
Given the huge emphasis put on preventing underage gambling by authorities in recent years, gambling operators have made blocking under-18s from accessing their online gambling sites a top priority.
This has, of course, made it increasingly difficult for underage players to gamble online, but not entirely impossible.
A recent BBC report claimed a 16-year-old boy managed to open an account in his father’s name and lose thousands of pounds. There have been other, similar stories of a child using a parent’s identity in recent years, especially in relation to in-app purchases in games such as FIFA.
In such underage gambling cases, many have argued that parents had a role to play in better supervising their children. But the industry could also go even further in its attempts to prevent children accessing gambling, assuming the goal is to be genuinely responsible rather than simply doing the minimum required.
The Gambling Commission’s Young People and Gambling Survey 2022 found that almost 1% of those aged 11-16 were classed as problem gamblers, with a further 2.4% determined to be ‘at risk’ gamblers. These numbers are clearly too high when one considers these children should not be gambling in the first place.
Part of the challenge for online operators is that ID can be faked. The first part of confirming someone’s identity online is to check that the identity is a real one with a valid name, age and address. This can be done fairly easily by using a combination of their financial footprint and public records. These checks have been available for some time through agencies such as Experian and TransUnion.
The second part is to check that the person submitting that identity is the person who owns it, rather than being someone who has ‘borrowed’ it from someone else, as was the case with the 16-year-old boy.
This can be done by requesting a selfie, which can be compared with the photo in an acceptable ID document. But even this isn’t foolproof because someone could use a photograph of the other person. Given it’s typically a human checking whether there’s a match and that human may be under pressure to perform this task quickly, this might go unnoticed.
Technology allows this to be done in a far more accurate manner using live selfies and facial comparison and is better able to detect fraudulent documents and known fake identities.
This is one reason we’ve chosen to employ artificial intelligence and machine learning for some parts of our digital ID app. These type of tools can detect whether a photograph is being held up to a camera, as well as the use of latex masks and other spoofing approaches. This means the chances of a child opening an account with a parent’s ID are massively reduced.
Remote identity verification technology is still in its infancy and while some operators are making use of it, we are a long way from widespread adoption.
We also need to consider whether or not children are being adequately protected from gambling ads when online and whether this also plays a role in encouraging them to try and circumvent the rules and gamble with fake IDs.
The Advertising Standards Authority’s recent 100 Children Report found that over a one-week period, 3.8% of the ads displayed on the personal devices used by children were for alcohol, gambling or other age-restricted products.
Unfortunately, the majority of these were gambling ads, but that’s not to suggest gambling companies were deliberately targeting underage consumers.
One of the interesting findings of the ASA report was that just 48% of all social media accounts held by 11-17-year-olds were registered with the child’s correct date of birth. Of the rest, 11% falsely suggested the child was over 18.
The data from the survey suggests there is widespread misreporting of true age by children and most the gambling ads shown to underage children were to those who’d incorrectly reported their age or to those visiting sites where more than 75% of the audience was over 18.
The only complete solution to this would be for social media platforms to verify the identity (and thus, the age) of all of their users, but this is something they are opposed to and the UK government so far has made clear it isn’t something it will be forcing them to do.
As with many other things, however, it may be that it is users rather than regulators that bring about a change in social media platforms’ behaviour.
If enough people are concerned about interacting on platforms where users are unverified, they may migrate towards platforms where they can be sure who they are interacting with. We are now seeing some nascent signs of social media platforms that do estimate age springing up.
Whether this becomes a bigger trend remains to be seen, but in the meantime, gambling companies must consider using all the tech available to them to make it extremely difficult for anyone under 18 to impersonate an older person and circumvent the regulations.
Philip Young is chief technical officer and co-founder of Arissian, creator of digital identification app Luciditi. Luciditi is a real-time digital identification platform that is used by gambling operators such as Premier Picks to identify customers and store their data.
