iGaming News

The Council of State has upheld the €100 weekly cash cap at Italy's top-up shops and struck down a ban on internet-connected devices there, while the decree meant to reorganise betting shops, gaming halls and machines lapsed in August. Rulings, not legislation, are now setting the rules for retail.

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.

Ontario's regulator has given theScore Bet the largest penalty it can impose for a single breach of its igaming standards, after a player accepted two cash-out offers on a CA$1,000 parlay and received neither. The ruling turns a cash-out figure on screen into something an operator must be able to pay.

Aichi says it received participation statements for its airport island integrated resort by the 30 September deadline and wants full proposals by 23 March 2027. It will not say who applied or how many, so Japan's most advanced second-round bid may have a contest or a single suitor.

Alex Frost, who led the racehorse owners' purchase of the Tote from Betfred in 2019, will hand over to former GiG and DraftKings executive James Coxon at the end of 2026. In the same announcement the Tote is closing its online gaming and cutting back a consumer digital business that its latest accounts show made an EBITDA loss of £11.9 million.

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.

Paul St-Pierre Plamondon, who praised a Liberal plan to license every online gambling site in Quebec, will lead the province with 59 of 127 seats. His party's budget plan books CA$300 million a year from sports betting sites, but a campaign endorsement is not a bill.

Yonhap, citing an unnamed source, says Grand Korea Leisure's marketing staff and executives have been meeting customers in Hong Kong, Macau, Singapore and Mongolia without proper legal review, 11 years after Chinese police arrested Korean casino staff for recruiting gamblers. GKL says its staff serve existing customers and recruit no one.

Pedro Sánchez's dissolution of the Cortes kills the only gambling-related measure that was actually before parliament, a ban on minors buying loot boxes. The Gambling Act reform never got that far, and the rules that matter most to operators were made by decree, where the election cannot reach them.

Data obtained by an opposition lawmaker show Kangwon Land's slot machine manufacturing business has run at a loss every year since 2020, while a Philippine sales office that cost about ₩700 million found no new distributors. The losses total about $11.1 million, not the $236 million some English-language reports have carried.

Thailand's digital ministry says it blocked 945,075 gambling-related URLs in the year to September, most of them found by its own AI-assisted monitoring and blocked under court orders. The count measures how hard the state is pushing; it does not show whether the market has shrunk.

The Kahnawà:ke Gaming Commission has suspended the operator authorisation of Polar Ventures SDRL after a show cause process, and announced it a week later. The notice names no website, gives no reason and sets no end date.

A week after the same notices went out in Washington, Maverick's Nevada arm has told the state it will permanently close the Maverick Casino Hotel and the Gold Country Inn in Elko unless a new operator takes them over. Court filings show both sit in the sale-leaseback portfolio that drew no bids in the company's bankruptcy.

The Gambling Commission found that staff at Rank's Grosvenor casinos treated customers' wealth or winning streaks as a reason for light-touch safer gambling checks, and that its anti-money laundering rules had not caught up with changes made in 2020. The regulator says risks more often associated with online gambling are equally alive on the casino floor.

Finance Minister Magín Díaz has sworn in the administrator of the National Lottery to run the Dirección General de Juegos de Azar until it is built. He keeps both his existing posts, although the law that created the regulator bars its director general from holding any other public office.

Stake Canada Ltd. is now on the regulator's register and says it expects to be fully operational on 12 October, provided it signs an operating agreement with the Alberta iGaming Corporation. The date sits one day inside the 13 October limit for operators moving out of Alberta's grey market.

The State Police's third notice closes the route Pace-O-Matic says it will take, disabling terminals rather than removing them, and puts bars' liquor licences on the line. None of the six skill game bills has left committee.

A former coal-mining town in Fukuoka says it will hand the prefecture an integrated resort proposal this month and wants the prefectural assembly to take it up in December. Under Japan's IR law the town cannot apply itself, and the prefecture has not said it will.

Galaxy Entertainment Group's chairman bought 4.6 million shares for cash on the first trading day after Macau's weakest monthly gaming revenue of the year, paying less than the stock traded for on the exchange that day. The filing shows the price; it does not show who sold.

The question is whether Betano, KTO, GaleraBet and Blaze ever asked for the forward to be prosecuted for defrauding them, and whether they did so in time. The separate charge of fraud in a sporting competition, over a yellow card in November 2023, is unaffected.

In a 60-page reply filed hours before licensed sites went dark, Jorge Messias asks the Supreme Federal Tribunal to refuse every request to suspend Provisional Measure 1.394, to wait for Paulo Gonet's opinion and to consider a new public hearing. The debate it proposes is one the government did not hold with the industry before it banned betting.

Spain's audiovisual regulator has ruled that an advert for a sports results app counted as gambling advertising because a "1 X 2 Apuestas" button appeared on screen, and that it was shown outside the 01:00 to 05:00 window the law allows. The broadcasts were in July 2024; the decision came 26 months later.

Finland's highest administrative court has ruled that betting run as a systematic, expert, income-earning activity is taxed on its net result, not bet by bet. It overturns the Tax Administration's long-held line nine months before the licensed market opens and the tax treatment of unlicensed play gets harsher.