Month: March 2023

This comes after KSA previously imposed an order on Red Ridge to halt the company from advertising illegally. However, KSA decided the impose the fine after the advertising continued.

“Promoters of illegal games of chance providers also receive our attention,” said René Jansen, KSA chairman. “They must also comply with the law, especially when it comes to protecting young adults.”

“We will do everything we can to stop these practices.”

Promoting illegal play

KSA said that Red Ridge was penalised for promoting four specific websites – Casinojager.com, Casinovergelijker.net, internetcasino-online.com and www.Nederlandseonlinecasino.com.

Each of the websites contained advertisements for operators that did not hold a licence in the Netherlands, violating article 1, (1)(a) of the country’s Betting and Gaming Act.

In its report of the investigation, KSA stated that the websites contained promotional text which communicated “careless and misleading statements”.

KSA also said that the websites’ content “may encourage immoderate participation by promoting unlimited play and wagering”, and also include negative statements about Cruks, the Netherlands’ self-exclusion service.

One of the more damning offences was found on the Casinojager.com website. KSA said that on the website, under a tab labelled “news” there was an article titled “Casino Without Licence” from 2 October 2021 which emphasises that players have more “freedom” playing on illegal online casinos compared to licensed casinos.

“Gambling at an unlicensed casino has its advantages,” the article reads. “There are less strict conditions regarding bonuses. The total of casinos is also a lot bigger. You will also have a little more freedom at an unlicensed casino.”

KSA also noted that from 1 May 2021 to 1 May 2022, 296,408 people based in the Netherlands visited casinojager.com.

Further evidence

KSA said that casinovergelijker.net featured text on its website that promoted Nordslot, despite the operator being unlicensed.

The promotional statement read: “Nordslot casino opened its virtual doors in the summer of 2021. The range of games is promising, the casino has an MGA license and they also give away generous bonuses! The welcome bonus can be up to €700. So don’t miss this opportunity and sign up immediately!”

Meanwhile, internetcasino-online.com featured a promotion regarding “top-rated” international casinos. Underneath text advertising this service, the following was included in what KSA described as “very small letters”:

“The Affiliate acknowledges that promoting on Netherlands market resources and using Dutch language is subject to legal restrictions in Netherlands. Such actions will be considered a breach of general terms and conditions and will lead to the immediate account closure if disclosed.”

Turning to nederlandseonlinecasino.com, KSA said the website was written in Dutch, and contains information purporting the “advantages” of illegal online casinos.

“Do you want to play unlimited without taking into account the countless restrictions of Dutch online casinos?,” it reads. “Then you can opt for international online casinos. They also apply certain rules, but in most cases these are less strict than the Dutch gambling rules. This way you can play as long as you want at
foreign casinos and deposit as much money as you want.”

Concluding the investigation

KSA said that upon investigating the websites, it found that none of them listed a responsible party as being in charge.

However, subsequent analysis found that Red Ridge Marketing was the domain holder for nederlandseonlinecasino.com, and that one individual – whose name was redacted in the report – owned the domains for casinojager.com, casinovergelijker.net and internetcasino-online.com. KSA said this individual is also the administrator of Red Ridge Marketing.

Gambling harm statistics

Separate to the Red Ridge Marketing’s fine, the Netherlands’ State Sectary for Public Health, Welfare and Sport Maarten Van Ooijen published provisional figures on gambling addiction in the country between 2016-2021.

According to the statistics, the number of people who reached out for help with a gambling addiction in the country fell by 10% from 2020, to 1,887 in 2021.

Van Kansspelen Branchorganisatie, the Netherlands’ gambling industry association, said that this statistic was very different to the country’s perception of gambling harms.

“These provisional figures negate the picture painted in politics and the media that the number of players with problematic gambling behavior is rising sharply,” said the association.

Of the 1,887, 87% were men, while 13% were women. The average age was 35.

In addition, 17% of the total was aged 25 or under, while 9% were aged 55 or over.

Help for gambling harm made up 3.4% of the 54,865 people that reached out for support across various addictions in the Netherlands in 2021.

Van Kansspelen Branchorganisati added that minimising gambling harm is a mission that all bodies must embark on together.

“Preventing gambling addiction is a joint task,” it continued. “Van Kansspelen therefore considers it important that all parties involved (government, addiction care and industry) jointly commit themselves to up-to-date and clear data on the requests for help for addiction care.”

Ismail Vali, founder and CEO of regulatory intelligence platform Yield Sec, has his eyes set on illegal gambling.

Unlicensed online gaming operations have experienced rapid growth over the past few years, driven by an increasingly strict regulatory environment in Europe. On these offshore sites – often no more than a Google search away – players receive no assurances of fair play, operators face no scrutiny from regulators and not a penny flows to the taxman.

But to some the illegal market is a scary monster. A threat to be trotted out by lobbying organisations whenever lawmakers start talking about restrictions. There is a healthy dose of ‘better the devil you know’ in many public conversations about how gambling should be regulated.

Half the problem is how in the dark we are about what illegal gambling looks like in practice. We have survey data and intuition but deep knowledge has so far eluded us. This lets regulators dismiss the scale of the threat – as the Gambling Commission has done on more than one occasion – and allows trade bodies to exaggerate the issue for political purposes.

What we really need are better tools to properly show us what we are up against so we can respond appropriately.

Vali’s Yield Sec offers itself as the solution.

Under the rock

Through the use of some complicated wizardry with keywords, Yield Sec is able to provide a detailed map of the illegal gambling sector in a particular market. Paying customers – be they regulators, trade bodies, law enforcement or indeed operators themselves – are able to see in minute detail where the illegal traffic is coming from.

According to Vali’s telling, the market itself operates in pretty grimy ways – belying the self-invented ‘forbidden fruit’ reputation that the operators themselves have tried to cultivate.  

“The name ‘black market’ itself is something that criminals gave themselves. It’s a way of convincing you that this is better for you in some way. It’s the black market. There’s something cooler about it.”

In reality, it is often the most vulnerable who are preyed upon by black market operators. Not only do they seem unconcerned about offering gambling to the underage or the self-excluded but they actively encourage it – in part through the use of affiliates.   

“They understand one thing really well in the illegal operator space, which is ‘I want pay the least to make the most’. They will go directly to a child, which is $5-10 cost per acquisition; a Gamstop person is $15-25 cost per acquisition.”

Military grade software

The software behind Yield Sec is some pretty potent stuff. Developed deep in the guts of the military-industrial complex, the predecessor of the code was used by various hard-edged US government entities including the CIA and the Department of Defense.

“The most basic way of looking at what Yield Sec was built on is it’s the same software that took down things like beheading videos from Al-Qaeda,” says Vali. “That was what I wanted to look at because when those videos were taken down, they never appeared again.”

But beyond his recent foray into regulatory technology lies an industry veteran as experienced as any other name in the business. That Vali has concentrated his efforts on black market gambling could be a sign of the times. But he has spent most of his career on what you might describe as the other side of the fence.

Poacher turned gamekeeper

Active in the sector when it was charitably more of a theoretical proposition than a real industry, Vali has carved a fascinating path through the birth and development of online gambling, seemingly always ahead of whatever is the ‘big new thing’.

Something of a renaissance man, he became head of development at Ladbrokes Interactive not long after the turn of the millennium. It was there he discovered the meritocratic spirit that allowed even relative outsiders to gaming to be given a hearing as long as they had the chops.

“I realised that you didn’t need to have 20 years of experience of running shops and the rest of it,” he says. “You just needed to have good ideas and be able to see those things through from concept build, get the thing up and running, make sure it worked, make sure the customers were happy and make sure it monetised itself successfully.”

Surfing the online poker wave

It wasn’t long until Vali entered the field where he was to really make his name –marketing.

“I hated how the marketing teams were traditionally doing these things, that they put some adverts in the shop windows and stuff,” he says. “And it was like, no one’s going to go from the shop window. We need to be advertising on the internet. That’s where the customers are. No one really got that.”

Vali spent much of the noughties poker boom as a chief marketing officer, first at ParadisePoker and later PokerStars, a company that he helped turn into the kings of online poker. And according to him it was surprisingly easy to do. “PokerStars were always number one because I always made sure that I stuck to my word of what we were willing to give customers,” he says.

Somewhat unusually for a gambling executive, Vali went to Oxbridge and – following a law degree and the beginnings of a career in finance – seemed to be well on his way to becoming a member of Britain’s cloistered elite. He explains his unexpected career swerve into the world of gambling as a product of a couple of good ideas.

The next frontier

Fresh out of Brasenose College, Oxford, Vali’s first job was as an internet analyst at New York investment bank Salomon Smith Barney, where he was promptly suspended for his out-of-the-box thinking.

This was the height of the dot.com boom. The ever-sceptical Vali says he did not believe that the stocks the bank was pushing had the long-term viability that had become the conventional wisdom.

Vali wrote an article arguing that the internet sectors with the most potential for growth were pornography and online gambling. The bank wasn’t best pleased.  

“Those are the two things that seemed to be what my friends were into whenever they came down to my flat where I had a dial-up internet connection,” says Vali. “At the time, whenever anyone came around to my apartment, they would sit there all night watching Playboy download, one pixel line at a time.

“And I’d be like, ‘Why don’t you go downstairs and buy it?’ They said if I’m going downstairs to buy it, I have to buy my groceries from that place in the morning. People wanted the anonymity.”

At the vanguard of industry innovation

This insight into human behaviour is classic Vali. Today, the idea that anonymity could be something that could be harnessed commercially may not seem like an earth-shattering thought, but at the time it was a flash of brilliance.     

“[The article] got me suspended from the bank – then it got me rehired at double my salary at the end of the week because we’d been inundated with people from gaming and porn companies asking us what does this guy know about it?”

Throughout his career, Vali has been at the vanguard of where innovation is happening in the gaming sector. From his involvement in the early development of the industry, to riding the wave of enthusiasm that characterised the glory days of the poker boom, to today, where regulatory intelligence is all the rage and entrepreneurs attempt to build the technological capabilities of the new Dot.country regime, he has been there.

The white, the grey and the black

Vali posits that the germ of the idea that would become Yield Sec developed as a consequence of the contractions of the off-shore model, which – despite its former status as the cradle of industry – was increasingly at odds with the new normal.

“Where Yield Sec started was the inherent sense of unfairness that there is something coming and it’s being cradled in islands like Curaçao and Malta,” says Vali. “What’s being brought to the rest of the world does not have any reason to exist any more.

Vali questions the logic of continuing to have these off-shore hubs in the new environment. In the old days you used to be able to broadcast multiservice whitelist online gambling to the UK and other European territories. Now that nearly every country has local regulations, having so many services in these jurisdictions makes less and less sense.

He believes there is no longer even “such a thing as a grey market”. Many would contend that this legal ambiguity, wherein some companies argue that they are operating fairly under the free movement of services rule of the Treaty of the Functioning of the European Union, has been exploited for years by unscrupulous operators which are running essentially black market operations.

“You’re basically saying that you’re looking to be crooked,” says Vali . “You don’t like the label of I’m a criminal, I’d rather be a grey market operator.”

The realm of the impossible

Whatever the future brings for Yield Sec, the scale of the problem of illegal gambling often beggars belief. Vali is clear about what his company can do.

“We can help you prosecute that case,” says Vali. “We can help you evidence it, we can help you case-manage it, we can help provide all of the information and we would then go to court as well to say the platform notices these things, we are able to provide testimony on that.”

As for the subject of gambling itself, Vali is philosophical.

“Gambling is in that realm of the impossible. It’s how do you get somebody to believe in something that you control?”

This spirit of derring-do is something Vali seems to admire about the industry. But he reiterates that there are certain boundaries it is important not to cross. The black market must be defeated because of its moral failures.

“Where this thing starts to come undone is when they go after the children and the self-excluded – because we all get a bad name [as a result] of that kind of activity. The customers will always see it as there’s just one industry. And the way I see it is we have one marketplace, but we’ve got two industries.”

On Wednesday (March 22), Texas lawmakers debated the bill, which would legalize mobile sports betting in the Lone Star State. The proposed law – which is backed by former governor Rick Perry – is accompanied by a House Joint Resolution which proposes an amendment to the Texas constitution, as gambling is specifically prohibited in the text.

If successful, the amendment will go to a national referendum in November, where the final decision to legalize sports betting will be placed directly in the hands of voters.

“Here to stay”

The bill’s sponsor Rep. Jeff Leach sought to characterize sports betting as an activity that was already “here to stay” in Texas.

“While this has been happening – even here in Texas for decades – it’s being done illegally,” said Leach. “It’s being done in the shadows, with bookies and offshore accounts, with no regulation, no protections for privacy or data, no monitoring, and certainly no recourse for anyone to be held accountable if something goes awry with a placed bet in the state of Texas.”

[Read full story on iGB North America]

Scheduled to open in early 2027, the integrated resort will be constructed on the man-made Al Marjan Island in the UAE capital city of Ras Al-Khaimah.

German foundation specialist Bauer has begun preparation for piling and enabling works at the project site, while ALEC, part of the Investment Corporation of Dubai, was awarded the main contract for the construction of the development.

The project, which will represent Wynn’s first development in the Middle East and North Africa region, will include a hotel with more than 1,000 rooms, shopping mall, meeting and convention facilities, spa, restaurants, lounges, a gaming area and other entertainment amenities.

“To fulfil and surpass the expectations of investors and all our stakeholders, we have teamed up with the best-in-class partners for the timely completion of a project that is the largest of its kind in the Emirate’s growing hospitality sector,” Marjan chief executive engineer Abdulla Abdooli said.

“Well-known for their cross-sector capabilities and expertise in building landmark projects, the appointment of ALEC Engineering and Contracting and Bauer International will ensure the timely completion of the integrated Wynn Resort, that is set to further catalyse Ras Al-Khaimah’s booming tourism market.”

House Bill 1027 passed yesterday (21 March) by a vote of 66-26 and will now move forward to the Senate for a further committee progress, where it could face additional amendments.

The final version of the bill would need approval from both the House and Senate before it could be passed to the governor for final sign-off.

Read the full story on iGB North America

The total number of suspicious matches recorded in 2021 was 903 – a record for Sportradar at the time.

This was reported in Sportradar’s second annual betting corruption and match-fixing report. The sports were monitored by its Universal Fraud Detection System (UFDS).

Although the number of suspicious matches rose, the report stated that over 99.5% of sports events have no instances of match-fixing, and no one sport had a suspicious match ratio of over 1%.

Football was once again the sport with the highest rate of suspicious matches, coming in at 775 for 2022 – 64% of the total. This was a rise of 11.5% year-on-year.

More than half of suspicious alerts for football took place at the third tier or lower. These made up 51.8% of the total suspicious matches.

The number of suspicious matches for basketball skyrocketed by 249.2% to 220, while the number for tennis and table tennis ticked up by 41.5% to 75.

Geographical spread

Suspicious matches took place across 12 sports and 92 countries.

Just under half of the matches took place in Europe, totalling at 630. The continent with the second highest number of suspicious matches was Asia at 240, followed by South America at 225. Africa was the fourth highest with 93, while North America had 24 instances of suspicious matches.

Sportradar provided the top 10 countries in which the most match-fixing took place. Brazil had the highest number of suspicious alerts for the year, at 152, followed by Russia at 92. The Czech Republic was third with 56 suspicious sporting events, while Kazakhstan was fourth with 43 instances.

A collaborative effort

Andreas Krannich, managing director at Sportradar Integrity Services, said that the company’s integrity strategy had performed well in 2022.

“Our multi-layered approach to sports integrity is paying off, as 2022 saw a record number of 169 sporting and criminal sanctions delivered which were supported by Sportradar Integrity Services data and reports,” he said

However, Krannich added that Sportradar Integrity Services could not prevent match-fixing on its own, and that those involved in sports need to prioritise integrity measures.

“Yet for the long-term anti-match-fixing outlook to significantly improve, there needs to be a greater emphasis placed on integrity from sporting stakeholders, as there remains a significant lack of investment and allocation of resources,” said Krannich.

“We offer bet monitoring free of charge but sports and governments need to invest in preventative measures such as education, and proactive and reactive intelligence collection – including carrying out end-to-end investigations and the acquisition of evidence that can be used in disciplinary and criminal proceedings – that will ultimately create a strong deterrent.”

Earlier this month, Sportradar reported a 30% rise in revenue for its full year 2022 results – an increase attributed to its growth in the US.

Tengco said that, under his term of leadership, the business’ management intended to spin off the corporation’s casino business to a private bidder, lengthen the regulator’s reach and continue building on the organisation’s nation-building programmes.

The Pagcor chief disclosed the organisation’s plans at the opening of the ASEAN Gaming Summit at the Marriott Manila Hotel, where he was the keynote speaker.

Since Tengco’s appointment in August 2022, the Pagcor board has been open to privatisation talks but he emphasised that welfare of employees during any transition was paramount.

Plans for 2023

A number of projects are planned for 2023, which the organisation says are geared towards “benefiting gaming industry stakeholders [and] upholding responsible gaming”.

In terms of specific programmes, Tengco highlighted the creation of regulatory frameworks for online poker operations, the enhancement of slot machine operations, the disposal of outdated gaming equipment and the creation of new regulatory manuals.   

“As we speak, our licensing and regulatory group has already accomplished projects like the updating of suppliers’ regulatory manual, implementing rules and guidelines for foundations, and crafting of gaming employment license regulations on prohibition on enter, stay, play,” said Tengco.

Tengco said that – following the topic of Philippines offshore gaming operators (POGOs) becoming a source of public debate in 2022 – the regulator had revised its policies for online gaming, adding that monitoring efforts were intensified to ensure lawful compliance.  

POGOs are a model of online gaming, wherein Philippines-based gaming businesses broadcast Pagcor-licensed online gaming to jurisdictions where it is not regulated, notably China.

While the activity has been legal in the Philippines since 2016, many of the underground businesses in the sector are still in operation – and have been linked to murders, gang activity and modern slavery.

The continued existence and state sanction of the sector remains a sore spot in relations between the Philippines and the People’s Republic of China.

Enforcement failings

Tengco admitted that enforcement failings had occurred in the past, and pointed to new engagement with various government bodies including the Department of Interior and Local Government, the Philippine National Police, and the National Bureau of Investigation to reform the Mutual Cooperation Agreement, which governs the country’s fight against unlicensed gambling.  

“We acknowledge our limitations on the side of enforcement and on our capacity to address illegal gambling, thus we reinforced our partnerships with various law enforcement agencies to address this concern,” he said.

“We are studying the possibility of regulating other facets of the overseas gaming operations, or the possible regulation of special class of business process outsourcing companies (BPOs) or those who service legitimate operators licensed abroad and amending the processing of penalties imposed on overseas gaming operators and their service providers so as to discourage non-compliance and involvement in any irregular activity.”

Domestically, Tengco said that Pagcor intends to expand its permitted game offerings and products to include live dealer games esports, online horse racing and online arcade games.

The submissions came during a call for evidence for the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) select committee inquiry into gambling regulation.

A number of the UK’s leading gambling operators, such as Bet365, Flutter, 888, Entain, Novomatic, Merkur and Kindred made submissions.

While the submissions greatly varied in both content and form, a number of key themes emerged – including frustration at the Gambling Commission’s conduct and scepticism at the feasibility of affordability checks.

Frustration at Commission

Flutter Entertainment – the largest online gambling business in the world by revenue – warned that the establishment of a clear process for implementation, following the release of the white paper, would be key to its success.

“The reason for this is that we have concerns about the general consultation process used by the Gambling Commission,” said Flutter.

The company said that it put a great deal of effort into responding to Commission consultations, emphasising that it not only provided the requested evidence, but sought to explain the issues involved in the implementation and offer its interpretation of the requirements.

But Flutter added that it is “rare” for the business’ feedback to be reflected in the final outcome.

“It is even rarer for the Gambling Commission to provide feedback on our response so that, for example, we can understand why our evidence was not seemingly taken into account in that final outcome,” added the business.

The company therefore encouraged both the DCMS and the regulator to ensure that talks going forward are “iterative discussions”.

Flutter also said that the Commission has on a “consistent basis seriously underestimated the complexity of the technology operated by licensees”.

The company continued by arguing that it was important that the Gambling Commission not only allows sufficient time for considered responses to be made to its consultations, but also provides “reasonable timeframes for implementation of any regulatory changes”.

Response from Bally’s

This call to ensure that the regulator best implements the aforementioned reforms was echoed by Bally’s Corporation who argued that it was a priority for the Commission to “enforce the spirit of the upcoming regulation”.

Bally’s Corporation also noted that the Commission had not always adopted the most effective regulation.

“Many of the approaches embraced by the Gambling Commission involve population-wide measures that do not consider emerging technologies that improve the confidence level of targeted regulation,” read Bally’s submission document.

Frustration at the behaviour of the Commission was seconded in Entain’s submitted evidence, which argued that the regulator would be more effective if it “adopted a co-operative rather than confrontational approach”, as well as better respected the interests of non-problem gamblers in its approaches to policy.

As such, it proposed a number of recommendations to improve the Commission’s relationship with the industry and be generally more competent in its work.

These eleven proposals included the idea that the Commission should be required to recruit from the industry, that regulatory initiatives be independently tested against the risk of customer departure from the licensed market and that the Commission starts to regulate in “a predictable and transparent manner” – including published tariffs for offences of varying severity.

Affordability concerns  

A number of operators also expressed concerns about the imposition of affordability checks on consumers, a matter which remains one of the most controversial potential provisions of the white paper.

Entain argued that the legislation of these requirements would have a “profound” influence on the development of the black market.

The operator pointed to survey data that showed that one in three players would consider betting on an unlicensed casino operator if these checks were introduced.  

On the other hand, Bet365 was less critical of the measure, highlighting that in anticipation of the review, it had implemented voluntary action on deposit limits for new customers.

However, the Stoke-based operator also argued that affordability checks need to balance “the need to protect those at-risk with the interests of the vast majority of people who gamble without experiencing harm”.

It therefore applauded the content of the speech by former gambling minister Paul Scully at the Betting and Gaming Council’s (BGC) annual general meeting, wherein he emphasised the need to make this process frictionless, as well as based on “financial risk”.

“We agree with the comments of the former minister that such checks must be tried and tested before they are implemented and stand ready to support this process,” said Bet365.

Flutter said that “very careful” thought was required when it came to affordability checks, which it warned could lead to “hundreds of thousands of Flutter customers facing untested and undeveloped background checks”, and therefore was the area of the white paper which caused the operator the most concern.

While it said that it understood the checks are intended to happen in the background, it also said there was “a lack of clarity” over how this would work and what data would be considered.

“We strongly believe that operators are the best people to manage the customer relationship and we encourage the government to look to build on our existing data and risk-based approaches to customer protection,” said Flutter.

Kindred’s 32Red, which runs 32red.com, will pay £4.2m, while Platinum Gaming, operator of Unibet in Britain, was ordered to pay £2.9m. 

Both brands also received an official warning following a Commission investigation.

Social responsibility failures

Breaking down some of the findings, the Commission said it identified a number of social responsibility failures, including that 32Red customer gambling session times should have prompted earlier identification of those who may have been experiencing gambling related harm.

The regulator also said that 32Red controls were not effective as they failed to identify and protect potential problem gamblers. The Commission gave one example of how a player was able to deposit £43,000 and lose £36,000 within seven days.

While the Commission said customer interactions at 32Red took place and were logged, these were found to be superficial and lacked depth, with the operator settling for customer assurances that they were comfortable with their level of gambling and could afford it.

As for Platinum Gaming, the Commission found that it failed to have effective policies and procedures designed to identify separate accounts held by the same individual. Offering an example, the regulator said self-excluded or blocked customers were able to register after being blocked or self-excluded on the 32Red platform.

In addition, Platinum Gaming was found to have failed to identify and interact with players who may have been experiencing harms associated with gambling.

Anti-money laundering failures

Turning to AML and failures included how 32Red failed to thoroughly implement measures set out in the Money Laundering, Terrorist Financing and Transfer of Funds (Information on the Payer Regulations 2017).

Customer account reviews identified that financial triggers for AML reviews at 32Red were too high and not appropriate to effectively manage money laundering and terrorist financing risks. In turn, this allowed what the Commission described as “significant” levels of gambling to take place within a short space of time without the operator knowing anything about customers’ financial situations.

32Red customers subject to a source of funds or source of wealth request were, in most cases, not restricted from depositing and gambling during the two-week period allowed by the operator to respond to the request. 

The regulator also identified an over-reliance on confidence that funds coming through Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) regulated firms mitigated or removed proceeds of crime risk.

The Commission highlighted one case in particular where a 32Red account was not deposit blocked, in line with its own policy and procedures, after an information request deadline expired. This allowed the customer to continue depositing, gambling £16,280 and losing £8,321 for a further two weeks until their account was blocked.

Looking at Platinum Gaming, the regulator said its policies, procedures and controls for AML were not appropriate.

Platinum Gaming, the Commission said, failed to ensure its policies, procedures and controls were kept under review and revised appropriately to ensure that they remained effective.

Licence breaches

In terms of specific licence breaches, the Commission ruled 32Red breached paragraphs 2 and 3 of licence condition 12.1.1, which relates to AML and preventing money laundering and terrorist financing. 

32Red was also found in breached of paragraph 1 of licence condition 12.1.2, covering AML and the measures for operators based in foreign jurisdictions. 

In addition, the Commission said 32Red failed to comply with paragraphs 1 and 2 of social responsibility code of practice (SRCP) 3.4.1 on customer interaction. 

As for Platinum Gaming, the Commission said it was also found guilty of the same licence condition and SRCP breaches, as well as SRCP 3.9.1 for the Identification of individual customers.

“These failures highlight clearly that both operators failed to interact with customers in a way which minimises the risk of them experiencing harms associated with gambling,” Commission executive director Kay Roberts said. 

“Our investigations also showed that policies and procedures were overlooked, both around customer accounts and anti-money laundering practices.

“Ultimately, it is an example which all gambling operators should take notice of to ensure they protect their customers at all times.”

Gross revenue for the three months to 31 December 2022 was 39.7% higher than €139.8m in the corresponding period of the previous year and also 23.4% more than the previous quarterly record of €158.2m set in Q3 of 2022.

Online casino

Casino was the primary source of revenue during the quarter, generating €109.8m in total revenue, up 48.3% year-on-year and 23.8% quarter-on-quarter, according to regulator the Gaming Regulation and Inspection Service (SRIJ).

Consumers spent €2.98bn playing online casino in Q4, up 42.1% from the previous year’s total and also a new record for the country’s market.

Slot machines were by far the most popular form of online casino, attracted 79.8% of all bets during, with French roulette a distant second with 8.5% of bets and blackjack 5.5%. 

Sports betting

Turning to the sports betting market and revenue was 30.0% higher year-on-year at €85.5m, with this also surpassing the previous quarterly record of €69.6m set in Q3 of 2022 by 22.9%.

Player spending reached an all-time high of €458.7m, an increase of 21.6% on the Q4 2021 total, with football drawing 74.2% of all bets, basketball 12.5%, tennis 7.6% and other sports 5.7%.

Breaking down football betting activity, the 2022 Fifa Football World Cup represented 25.0% of all wagers, with the Uefa Champions League at 7.4%, Portuguese Primeira Liga 6.9% and the English Premier League 6.4%. 

Wider market

Other statistics published by the SRIJ included that by the end of Q4, 340,000 new players had registered with licenced operators in the country, with 60.0% of these aged between 25 and 44.

The number of self-excluded players grew by 41,500 year-on-year to reach 150,900 at the end of the quarter.

In addition, the SRIJ said 54 notices of closure were issued to illegal operators during Q4, while 74 blocking orders were issued for such websites.