Kansspelautoriteit

The Dutch regulator found Endorphina slots on 28 unlicensed domains open to Dutch players, seven of them run by the operator it fined a record €37.25 million last month. It has not fined the studio, but rejected every argument it made against responsibility.

The Kansspelautoriteit's annual market scan shows licensed gross gaming revenue in the Netherlands fell from €4.5 billion to €4.1 billion in 2025, with online betting down 30.2%. Its half-year monitor counts 1.48 million online accounts without a matching rise in players, which the regulator says may point to people getting around per-account deposit limits.

The International Association of Gaming Regulators will run a coordinated consumer campaign against unlicensed online gambling from 9 to 13 November, built around a free site where players enter a gambling site's address to check its licence. IAGR has not said which jurisdictions the tool, supplied by a regulatory technology vendor, will cover.

The Netherlands Gambling Authority will take applications in January for the only licence to run pool betting on horse racing from July 2027. The winner gets a land-based monopoly and hands 10% of its gross gaming revenue on Dutch races to the sport.

The Dutch regulator worked out a fine of €292.6 million from search data, then had to cut it to €37.25 million because the law caps penalties at 10% of worldwide turnover. The operator ignored a penalty order, left €840,000 in penalty payments unpaid and never answered the regulator.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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 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.

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 Administrative Jurisdiction Division ruled on 16 September that the single-licence system for instant lotteries, retail sports betting and the lotto is a proportionate restriction on the free movement of services, that the East Brabant court used evidence it was not allowed to use, and that JVH's separate attack on Lotto BV's licence came too late. A second ruling the same day kept the charity lotteries at 69 draws a year.

The 2021 licences expire at the end of this month. Bet365, TOTO, Holland Casino, Kansino, FairPlay, Bingoal, GGPoker and Betcity have theirs to 2031. New in the renewal test: every violation definitively established in five years, what the operator did about it, and "additional points of attention" for some. The rest of the market has under two weeks.

The Dutch regulator says it would rather have waited for the appeal ruling, but the current licences expire on 31 December. If the monopoly falls, revocation will come no sooner than a year after the judgment.

Kansspelautoriteit chairman Michel Groothuizen says it is "naïve" to think a national regulator can beat a cross-border black market that costs the state more than €500m a year in tax, and that parliament barely mentioned Europe.

PowNed's new PowCrime platform showed people registered on the national self-exclusion register getting into gaming halls on somebody else's identity document. The regulator calls it a serious signal and is acting against the venues named, and it has conceded the point that matters: land-based access control is a manual process.

PowNed sent someone registered on Cruks into gaming venues using another person's identification, and got in. One of the three venues under scrutiny is a state-owned Holland Casino site in Eindhoven.

Researchers at the University of Amsterdam have built a machine-learning model that reads betting behaviour rather than what players say about themselves, and released it free. The Kansspelautoriteit funded it and is careful to call it an instrument rather than a substitute for duty of care.

The Netherlands Gaming Authority has renewed Holland Casino Online's licence for a further five years from October 2026, confirming the state-backed operator's continued place in the regulated Dutch market even as a 37.8% GGR tax rate squeezes its margins and the broader industry warns of channelisation risk.

The Netherlands Gambling Authority has penalised a licensed operator for failing to step in as customers lost tens of thousands of euros, part of a widening enforcement wave the regulator says will produce several more duty-of-care fines.