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The report also cites brands targeting a specifically banned vertical or product within a jurisdiction as driving black market activity. While markets across Europe have many examples, one such flagged in the report is that iGaming remains illegal for licensed operators in France.
“The largest black market operators have scaled to create recognisable brands with traffic that can compare to domestically licensed operators,” the report’s authors wrote. “The top group of sites by common owner has a 12% share of traffic, while the largest single brand has 10%.”
Beyond offering crypto payment solutions, a number of black market operators are licensed in “light touch” offshore jurisidictions which use opaque offshore operating structures to help to obscure company ownership and make local enforcement against these companies complex, the report noted.
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The text also bans exploiting situations of economic crisis, unemployment, debt, emotional distress, grief, anxiety, depression, loneliness, or other conditions of vulnerability to attract, retain or reactivate gamblers.
Operators must maintain permanent mechanisms for age verification, self-exclusion, voluntary time and wagering limits, and information on the user’s own gambling behaviour. Self-exclusion must be effective with all authorised operators.
The text also prohibits bets placed using credit cards, the use of predictive models to identify moments of greater vulnerability, and platform design mechanisms that hinder a conscious decision to stop betting, leave the service, or activate limits and blocks. Operators must maintain permanent alerts about compulsive gambling, indebtedness and asset loss, and adopt verifiable protocols for identifying risky behaviour.
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“There should be, in my opinion, a review of the whole ISC or consumption tax framework and find a kind of alignment or a better way to get an income in terms of taxes, but that should be balanced in order to avoid the disruption of businesses and a migration of customers to the illegal market.”
Atucha warns there is a tipping point where higher taxes can undermine channelisation, citing the UK and Germany as important case studies.
“I sometimes wish regulators would look at other cases,” he adds. “I mean, what happened in Germany, what’s happening in the UK.”
