KSA goes after DigitalOcean to curb offshore affiliates

Kansspelautoriteit, the Dutch Gaming Authority, has instructed hosting service provider DigitalOcean to stop providing access to the market in the country to offshore affiliate websites. The regulator said that affiliates hosted on DigitalOcean’s services were targeting Dutch players and offering them offshore gambling products without a license to do so.

DigitalOcean is not complicit in this matter, the watchdog explained, but the affiliates’ owners were anonymous, and they could not be targeted individually. As a result, the regulator has opted to pursue a different course of action and ask the hosting provider to cut access for these websites to the market.

The affiliate websites mentioned in the press release by the regulator include casinozonderregistration dot net and nieuw-casinos dot net, both of which have been said to list offshore brands that promoted "illegal gambling," the regulator said in a statement.

The watchdog has been working hard to curb the access of such third parties to the regulated iGaming market in the Netherlands, turning to both hosting and payment providers to seek assistance and enact tougher measures on offending parties.

Although the Dutch Gaming Authority has put much of its most recent efforts into going after operators and issuing often staggering penalties, the latest enforcement comes after careful research of affiliates in the space of two years and discovering websites that syphoned off Dutch players from the regulated gambling market.

DigitalOcean now has four weeks to ensure that it honors the regulator’s request after which the watchdog may resort to penalties. In similar news, the Dutch Gaming Authority confirmed a team-up with Cloudflare, a content delivery network services, DDoS migration and cloud cybersecurity company, designed to further enhance the regulator’s ability to deny access of offshore gambling websites to the regulated market.

The partnership also targeted two websites, to name onlinecasinosspelen dot com and nederlandscasinos dot net. Cloudflare and the Dutch Gaming Authority will continue to collaborate on similar moves against unauthorized gambling websites and affiliates over the coming months.

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