Netherlands: all our coverage

Spain's consumer affairs ministry has switched on a regulator-run system that will add up each player's deposits across all licensed online operators and stop them at €700 a day, €1,750 a week and €3,300 over four weeks, plus a portal that shows players their whole market footprint. The limit binds from March 2027, and players can lift it themselves after three working days.

The Curaçao Gaming Authority has set out its fullest account yet of the breach of its licensing portal, blaming a German researcher and weighing civil action. The same document dates the unlawful access from December 2025 to September 2026, and says nothing about what was taken or who has been told.

The Senate has passed a bill that would make it an offence for anyone under 25 to gamble "by any method, electronic or otherwise", in a country that is about to license online gambling for the first time. The House still has to agree the Senate's amendments, and no start date has been set.

France's regulated gambling market barely grew in the first half, and only because online sports betting had a World Cup June. The regulator now says the full-year figure depends on whether a record 5.85 million active online accounts keep playing after the tournament, and on a lottery operator whose French revenue is shrinking.

The Stockholm-listed slots supplier says the Malta Gaming Authority has extended its licence to peer-to-peer games, the class that covers poker and betting exchanges, so it can supply prediction markets to operators. A European gambling regulator is licensing as gaming a product that Washington proposed six days ago to define as a swap.

Five years after the Dutch online market opened, the Kansspelautoriteit's chairman says fines on illegal operators are hardly ever collected and suing a platform could take five years, so regulators are drawing up with Google a list of every legal operator in the EU, and anything not on it could be kept out.

Google will let certified online gambling advertisers buy the slot at the top of YouTube's homepage from 21 October, widening a carve-out that has covered only sports betting since 2022. The notice names no markets, and it arrives in a month when European lawmakers are moving to restrict gambling advertising rather than extend it.

The Dutch regulator says 711 required customers paying by methods other than an ordinary bank account to stake deposited money at least once before cashing it out, and called the practice highly undesirable. There is no fine, and no figure for how many players were affected; it is the third public round of this kind since the KSA warned operators in March 2024.

Denmark's government has put its lapsed gambling advertising bill back before the Folketing, with a 10-minute buffer around every live sports broadcast and new limits on who may appear in gambling ads. The clause with the most commercial bite is quieter: affiliates could no longer be paid on players' turnover or losses.

An independent Regulatory Commission heard the young striker's case that he placed none of the bets himself, and fined him anyway because he opened and funded the six accounts that others used. The written reasons put the total stake at under £2,000 and redact who placed the bets.

The Dutch regulator says licensed operators must match a player's full first names and surname against the name on the bank account, after an investigation found minors depositing from their own accounts and from youth accounts. Players verified the old way must be checked again.

A Dutch affiliate quality mark put nine questions to ten AI assistants and reports that every one named an online casino without a Dutch licence at least once. The sharper finding is that three put unlicensed brands on lists they described as legal or licensed by the Dutch regulator.

Three months after Greece rewrote its gambling law, the Hellenic Gaming Commission has shown the finance minister an AI tool built to find and document illegal gambling websites. The minister brought news of criminal complaints against 18 influencers, and a set of figures that shows how large the job is.

Illegal operators have been rebuilding licensed Dutch gambling sites on .co.nl instead of .nl and sending visitors on to illegal casinos. The regulator had them removed within 48 hours by asking the extension's private operator, a route that needs no court order but says nothing yet about how many players the clones caught.

The Åland operator behind mycasino.ch will give Meta licence documents and website addresses so Facebook and Instagram can tell Swiss licensees from offshore operators and their affiliates. Meta has said nothing publicly, and the pilot comes a week after Dutch operators took the platform to court.

Polymarket has confirmed it is challenging the Dutch gambling regulator's order in court, after being charged for blocking Dutch users a day late. Its case is that event contracts belong with the financial markets supervisor, an argument that, if it won, could land it under the Netherlands' indefinite ban on selling binary options to retail clients.

The Ministry of Finance has listed kalshi.com as a site offering prohibited gambling, and internet providers must block it by 15 October. The order covers the website only, but it puts the largest US prediction market on the same footing in Czechia as an unlicensed online casino.

The Kansspelautoriteit says an impostor got a lottery licence in the name of a Katwijk football club and used it to sell tickets on eight websites. The regulator calls it a new risk, and it has tightened the checks behind the licence register it tells consumers to trust.

The licensed operators' trade body has served its summons on Meta, and a day later the House of Representatives backed a motion that would let the regulator fine platforms that keep showing illegal ads after being told to remove them. The regulator, meanwhile, is recirculating a survey on how normal gambling has become.

The Liège group has bought 100% of the company behind Carousel.be, its partner since 2012, taking over a B+ online licence and the gaming hall in Harelbeke that Belgian law requires behind it. The price is undisclosed, and the sellers are keeping the 711 brand that grew out of Carousel.

The Kansspelautoriteit has issued guidance after finding that not all licensed operators let players close an account as easily as the rules require. Forced calls to customer service, fresh ID checks, cooling-off periods and win-back bonuses are all named as practices that do not comply.

Follow the Money's first reporting from the Curaçao Gaming Authority leak says the regulator's own assessors doubted the declared ownership of the Curaçao companies behind Stake and 1xBet and granted licences anyway. The regulator's answer, that it did not reject applicants mid-transition, goes to the heart of the island's licensing reform.

TOTO, Holland Casino, Kansino, FairPlay, Bingoal, bet365, GG Poker and Betcity have licences to September 2031. For the first time the regulator explicitly examined violations definitively established in the previous five years, asked applicants what they had done about them, and issued unnamed operators "additional points for attention".

The regulator has reminded operators that they must screen customers against asset-freezing measures, block designated individuals from opening accounts or betting, freeze funds immediately and report to the Minister for the Economy. The case behind the warning brought a €20,000 fine, a suspended two-month operating ban, and personal penalties for two executives.