Regulatory
Licensing, compliance, and regulator activity worldwide.
Vlad-Cristian Soare was dismissed on Friday and Valentin-Ioan Tomescu appointed in his place, both in the same Official Gazette. Soare had been in post fifteen months, and arrived because his predecessor left over audit failures.
The Gaming Commission voted 3-0 and one commissioner said the people he wanted in front of him were not there. Of the $3.6 million Mathew Bowyer lost at the property, $88,000 came on the current owner's watch. It is paying for all of it.
The communications minister said there should be an annual award for the platform that commits the most sins against Malaysians, and named Facebook. The number that matters is not 78. It is 30, the minutes his regulator spends on each of 470,593 takedown requests.
Parliament cleared the package on 19 August. Wagering ads disappear from live sport, from stadiums and from players' shirts, athletes and influencers can no longer promote betting, and a single national register will let Australians switch the advertising off everywhere at once. It commences on 1 January 2027.
Attorney General James Uthmeier has gone after the operators and the payment rails in the same action, naming Worldpay, Trustly, Praxis and Breeze Labs alongside Stake and VGW. Suing the processors is the part the rest of the industry should be reading.
The Gambling Commission found a player who placed 4,800 bets in a day and 7,000 the next without triggering a warning, and another who staked more than £215,000 in a single session and was flagged the following morning. The controls existed. They were manual, and they were too slow.
Forensic work on more than 400 seized devices has turned an illegal online gambling investigation into an organised crime case spanning continents. Court documents allege contact with senior politicians, police and immigration officials. Nobody in those categories has been named or charged.
Every one of the country's 195 licensed casinos has been investigated, and roughly a quarter of them have now lost or had their licence suspended. The government is presenting the campaign as progress. Tourist arrivals have fallen 47.8%.
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.
Finanstilsynet has ordered the Copenhagen payments firm to stop taking on new online gaming business customers until it can document that serious money-laundering control failures have ceased. Inpay says its board had already paused that onboarding three weeks before the ruling landed.
Tarcísio de Freitas told a healthcare debate that Brazil must choose between ending betting and being ended by it, framing the country's regulated market as a public-health emergency comparable to tobacco. He is seeking re-election, and he is not the only senior politician to have found the subject.
Maputo has created a dedicated concession framework for online games of chance, splitting them off from the land-based casino regime just as casino tax receipts fall to little more than half of what the treasury budgeted. What it has not created, yet, is any published route to a licence.