iGaming News

The regulator has seen gambling activity spike around the days minimum-income payments land, and has been asking since 2023 how to check whether a casino-card applicant is a benefit recipient. The answer on the table is a yes-or-no lookup against an ID number. The Data Protection Commissioner's alternative, a card that marks the holder out, drew warnings about stigma.

S&P Global has published a credit FAQ warning that Genting Bhd may not be able to defend its investment-grade rating while pursuing $10.5 billion of expansion in New York and Singapore. Fitch cut the group to the same rung on Monday. It now sits one notch above speculative grade with a negative outlook and, in S&P's words, no more buffer.

Euromat puts Europe's illegal online market at €12 billion and says it has tripled since 2019. The Betting and Gaming Council promotes a separate report putting the global figure at $50 billion. The two numbers cannot be compared, both were commissioned by interested parties, and both reach the same conclusion about what enforcement is doing wrong.

Citigroup expects MOP20.5 billion for the month even though the first six days ran 10% below August's daily rate. Last week CLSA put September growth at 0.3% against a 9.5% consensus. Both are reading the same shoulder month, and the gap between them is the widest of the year.

Chief Justice John Roberts denied Red Rock Casino's emergency application on Friday without comment, leaving in place a DC Circuit judgment that the resort must recognise and bargain in good faith with the Culinary Union. The dispute runs back to a 2022 finding that a fair election could not be held at a Station Casinos property.

The ANJ is looking at the front-of-shirt deal between the Ligue 1 club and a company that now runs its own event-contracts exchange, according to L'Equipe, the French sports daily. France blocked Polymarket in July, and the question this raises is whether a prediction-market operator can be a football sponsor in a country where it cannot take a bet.

Chancellor John Healey is said to be weighing an increase to the duty on gaming machines, a year after remote gaming duty went from 21% to 40%. A doubling would take the three bands to 10%, 40% and 50%, and analysts have told the Racing Post it would cost nearly 3,000 betting shops and around £70m of the racing levy.

The government has given the Gambling Commission a permanent chair after an interim stretch the trade press puts at 20 months. Ruth Evans arrives from Stop Scams UK, the body that persuaded banks, telecoms firms and technology platforms to sit at the same table, and her first sentence on the job named the technology sector.

Four Northern Territory-licensed businesses sell Australians entries into US Powerball and EuroMillions draws. From 1 January 2027 they cannot, and online keno goes with them. The Lottery Corporation, which backs the change, has put the cost of losing its own online keno business at A$25 million of annual earnings.

Prime Minister Hun Manet has ordered a nationwide suspension of live online betting operated from casino premises, with licence revocation for anyone who ignores it. Play resumes only once the government has built the legal and digital controls it says are missing, and the order arrives days after the regulator began drafting a suitability test for licence renewals.

The Commercial Gambling Management Commission is building an integrity and quality evaluation framework that would set minimum conditions for holding a casino licence. It follows a year in which the regulator revoked 20 licences and suspended 29 more over links to online scam operations.

A peer-reviewed survey of 563 employees at six of Macau's integrated resort operators found 33.9% in the severe or extremely severe anxiety band and 16% reporting depression at the same level. The strongest protective factor the researchers identified costs an operator nothing: colleagues who talk to each other.

The Georgia manufacturer has bought the gaming operations arm of Win Systems, including its Gold Club electronic-roulette business, taking on an installed base across Mexico, Peru, Colombia, Puerto Rico and Panama. Terms were not disclosed, and the deal turns a US regional supplier into a Latin American one overnight.

Researchers audited every one of the 624 gambling websites licensed in Britain and found dark patterns on 86% of consent banners, no reject option on 24%, and personal data being processed before consent on two-thirds. A second, randomised study then showed the most common banner design measurably pushes people into sharing data they did not want to share.

A new paper by the former New South Wales regulator Paul Newson argues that Australia's bans on online casino and in-play betting are handing the market to offshore operators, and that the country's illicit tobacco trade shows how quickly practical control is lost. It was prepared for Entain Australia and New Zealand, and it lands as New Zealand prepares to award its first 15 online casino licences.

Told by regulators in Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Mississippi, New Jersey, Ohio and Pennsylvania that it could not offer both, Underdog has chosen its CFTC-registered event contracts over the draft games that built the company. Drafts close in those states on Wednesday evening, after the NFL season kicks off.

The government has commissioned a special investigator to map gambling among children and young adults, review operators' marketing on both the licensed and unlicensed markets, and propose new protections, with a report due by 29 February 2028. The health minister says risky gambling among young men has doubled in a few years and one in five is affected.

The City of Springfield has taken MGM Resorts to Hampden Superior Court over alleged breaches of the 2013 host community agreement, from employment levels to a downtown building left behind scaffolding for seven years. MGM calls the suit frivolous and says the real story is a proposed sale to a "well-qualified casino operator" that the mayor's office has stalled since early 2024.

A Hong Kong default judgment against a Macau high roller cannot be enforced in Singapore because gambling debts offend the country's public policy, the High Court has ruled, even where the gambling was lawful at a licensed casino. The decision unsettles a 2004 precedent and the way Asian casinos extend credit to customers whose assets sit in Singapore.

Gambling duties and casino tax brought the Inland Revenue Authority of Singapore S$3.6 billion in the year to March, growing faster than corporate income tax or stamp duty. The report does not separate the casino take from the duties, which limits what can be read into it about Marina Bay Sands and Resorts World Sentosa.

The province and the Federation of Sovereign Indigenous Nations have amended their Gaming Framework Agreement to keep the Saskatchewan Indian Gaming Authority's PlayNow.com as the only legal online operator for another three years, add 49 slot machines to SIGA's allocation and approve a First Nations gaming centre pilot at Flying Dust First Nation.

The Department of Internal Affairs' minimum standards for the licensed online casino market, in force since 8 July, require cryptographically secure random-number generation, continuous monitoring, and a ban on games that adapt their outcomes to a player's results. As the department works towards a licensing auction, the rules put the mathematics behind online pokies on the record.

The Nevada Gaming Control Board used its first meeting after the Ninth Circuit ruling to say sports event contracts are sports bets, full stop. Kalshi's co-founder says the company will keep arguing for a single federal regulator, and New Jersey has now asked the Supreme Court to settle it.

The Belgrade-based group will cease operating under its Malta Gaming Authority licence, close the Mozzart.com brand and its affiliate programme, and put its money into markets where it holds a domestic licence. It is the second European operator in a month to decide that a Maltese licence no longer buys what it used to.