IAGR Plans First Illegal Gambling Awareness Week With a Free Licence Checker

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 International Association of Gaming Regulators (IAGR) will hold its first Illegal Gambling Awareness Week (IGAW) from 9 to 13 November 2026, which it calls the first internationally coordinated consumer campaign on unlicensed online gambling
• The message is to check whether a site is licensed where you play before betting, and member regulators can brand and distribute the materials from 6 November
• CheckBeforeYouPlay.org, a free tool contributed by Paris-based Sharp Vision, launches on 9 November and lets consumers enter a site's URL to see available licensing information for covered IAGR member jurisdictions
• IAGR has not named the participating regulators or the jurisdictions within the tool's scope, and it cites no figures on the size of illegal gambling
• The week follows the IAGR conference in Lima, where Gambling Commission acting chief executive Sarah Gardner told regulators that in a global industry no single jurisdiction stands alone

IAGR Turns Its Illegal Gambling Work Towards Consumers

IAGR announced the week in a release dated 26 October and published on 27 October. According to the release, the association outlined it at a briefing during its annual conference in Lima, Peru, held from 19 to 22 October. The week is meant to support coordinated communications by member jurisdictions, and its message, in IAGR's words, is "before you bet, check whether the site is licensed where you are playing."

"The reach of online gambling makes this a shared challenge for regulators," said IAGR president Ben Haden, whom the association lists as representing Great Britain. He said coordinated communications could help more people understand why local licensing matters and where to find reliable information.

The release says consumers using unlicensed sites may face unpaid winnings, limited options for resolving disputes and misuse of their personal or financial information, and may lack the responsible gambling protections required of locally licensed operators. It adds that uninformed consumers may unknowingly fund criminal organisations, including those involved in drug trafficking and terrorist financing.

What Members Will Receive and What the Tool Does

The materials were developed by R&R Partners, which IAGR describes as an independent marketing and communications agency. From 6 November, members can distribute 30-second and 15-second videos, social media content, a draft press release and talking points, with English and Spanish in the initial package. Members may add their own branding, post daily during the week, issue local announcements and arrange interviews. The release names no participating regulator and asks those wishing to join to contact IAGR's chief executive.

The campaign will feature CheckBeforeYouPlay.org, which IAGR says Sharp Vision contributed free of charge. According to the release, consumers enter a gambling site's URL and see available licensing information for covered IAGR member jurisdictions, drawn from regulatory records and other verified public sources. The site was not open to the public on 28 October. IAGR has not said which jurisdictions are covered or on what terms Sharp Vision provides the service.

"People often mistake visibility for trust," said Kevin Mullally, who became IAGR's first chief executive in February. "We want consumers to routinely check the licensing status of a site before opening an account or making a deposit."

IAGR describes Sharp Vision as a regulatory technology company that helps regulators monitor markets, analyse betting and payment data and identify unlicensed sites; its founder, Cyril Casanova, was on IAGR's Lima speaker list. In September, Portuguese news agency Lusa reported that Turismo de Portugal, home to the Gaming Regulation and Inspection Service (SRIJ), had chosen Sharp Vision's platform to detect illegal gambling sites under a one-year contract worth €19,990.

The campaign builds on regulator-to-regulator work: IAGR set up an Illegal Gambling Working Group in 2024 as a confidential forum for sharing information, which the Gambling Commission volunteered to lead. In her Lima keynote, Gardner said the Commission had disrupted 1,134 websites in 2025/26 and that "working with others is absolutely vital".

A URL Check Fits the Way Illegal Sites Now Borrow Trust

Mullally's point about visibility describes a problem regulators already handle case by case. The Kansspelautoriteit (Ksa) this month had 26 cloned .co.nl gambling sites taken down, nearly all copies of licensed brands, and a Dutch study found that three AI assistants listed unlicensed casinos as legal. A check that starts from the address rather than the brand is, in principle, the right defence against a clone. Registers such as the Gambling Commission's public register are organised around licensees, not the address a consumer is looking at.

Coverage Will Decide Whether the Tool Helps or Misleads

IAGR promises "available licensing information" for "covered" member jurisdictions, and that qualifier carries the risk. A site that returns no result could be illegal, or simply licensed somewhere outside the tool's scope, and a consumer may read silence either way. Until IAGR publishes the coverage list and explains how the records are kept current, the tool's value cannot be judged.

A Vendor Holding the Front Door Needs Clear Terms

Sharp Vision sells monitoring services to regulators, and the release discloses nothing about data handling, funding or how long the contribution lasts. A free public tool that sees which sites consumers are worried about would generate useful market intelligence, and regulators endorsing it should say who holds that data. That is no reason to doubt a tool that costs consumers nothing, but disclosure would let regulators recommend it without reservation.

The week is a sensible move from cross-border enforcement talk to something a consumer can use. Its credibility now rests on IAGR naming the regulators and jurisdictions behind it before 9 November.