ACMA cuts three more online casinos from Australia

Australia continues to actively uproot online casinos that operate in the country without a license to do so. Presently, no operator is allowed to run a licensed online casino in the country, which makes any such websites technically illegal.

Three more sites were ousted from the Australian online casino market

The Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) has named three more companies that have now been banned from operating in Australia. The trio of offenders under the Interactive Gambling Act 2021 are:

• A Big Candy
• Jackpoty
• John Vegas Casino

This follows a recent ban on eight other websites. ACMA has been seeking to manually uproot what it considers to be illegal gambling websites since 2017. The initial stages of this process saw 220 companies leave the market voluntarily.

The first blocking requests from the regulator came in November 2019, and the list now features more than 995 gambling and affiliate websites which have been blocked directly through internet service providers.

The latest three casinos may not be technically "illegal" and still be licensed in another jurisdiction, but for the purposes of Australian law, they are treated as unauthorized online casinos.

Australian law currently prohibits online casino games of chance, with sports betting the only allowed interactive form of wagering presently. ACMA has been actively working to curb such websites that continue to target Australian citizens. There have been several distinct attempts to this end.

ACMA takes the fight to block illegal operators overseas

Apart from actively introducing blocks locally, the regulator has similarly sought to build an international coalition of partners that helps it curb the incidence of online casinos that specifically target Australians.

Australia has reached out to Curacao and appealed to lawmakers locally to seek and strengthen the regulatory regime for gambling companies so that any Curacao-licensed casino would bear responsibility for offering unauthorized products to Australian customers.

Although this is still an effort in its early days, there is good evidence to suggest that ACMA could be successful in securing assistance from overseas counterparts, effectively stopping Curacao-licensed websites from targeting Australian customers.

When ACMA first started enforcing its new rules about online casinos, the 220 companies that left, were represented by some of the biggest names in the industry.

ACMA, however, said that it would lodge complaints with its regulators in prominent jurisdictions such as Malta and the United Kingdom, prompting them to swiftly withdraw from the market. Something similar may happen again if ACMA and Curacao find a common language to address the issue.

Image credit: Unsplash.com