This story is sponsored by Betfair
Betfair, William Hill and bwin were among the dot.com gambling domains added to the Belgian Gaming Commission’s blacklist of illegal sites this week.
Betsson, Bet-At-Home, BetClic, Expekt, Stan James, 188 and Betway are also among the latest group of 10 dot.coms to be blocked by the four largest internet service providers under the country’s gaming legislation. According to the amended legislation which came into force on 1 January last year, online operators without a Belgian licence now face potential fines of up to €100,000 for “facilitating”, “advertising” or “recruiting” for illegal games of chance in Belgium. Players in the country also face fines of up to €25,000 for playing on sites that haven’t been licensed by the Commission.
The sports betting blacklist was published at the same time the Commission confirmed the issue of online gaming permits to three Belgian-licensed offline sports betting operators - Betfirst.be, Vincennes.be and PMU-owned Bingoal.be - with a further 20 granted to physical gaming arcade operators and four to bricks ‘n’ mortar casino operators.
As revealed back in January and confirmed this week, PokerStars was the only operator without an offline licence in Belgium that has been granted an online licence in the territory, by dint of its partnership with Belgian casino owner Circus Groupe, which began back in 2010. Under the Belgian Royal Decree that came into effect last year, licences are restricted to licensed land-based gaming entities in Belgium, with nine A+ licences on offer to casinos, 34 F1+ permits to sports betting operators and around 180 B+ licences to arcade operators.
888, Everest Poker, Titan Poker and Winamax were among the dot.coms blocked in February and March of this year. However, the Belgian list at this stage only contains 30 domains, a tiny number compared to the 4,025 of varying suffixes on the blacklist of Italian regulator AAMS.
