KSA teams up with Cloudflare to tackle illegal gambling

The Dutch gambling regulator, the Kansspelautoriteit, has teamed up with Cloudflare in a bid to strengthen the legal online gambling market’s resilience against illegal operators and bad actors. The Netherlands has been on a crusade to eradicate illegal gambling, with efforts spanning targeted sanctions on illegal companies to build a strong regulated market with a very high channelization rate.

Now, the Kansspelautoriteit has confirmed that it is also teaming up with the American content delivery network services, DDoS migration, and cloud cybersecurity company to further enhance the regulated market and fight back against illegal operators. This comes following a brief flare-up between Cloudflare and Kansspelautoriteit with the regulator accusing the company of, in fact, facilitating illegal gambling to begin with.

However, further investigation indicated that the watchdog was in the wrong, prompting a rapprochement between the two parties. The case concerned two companies, namely onlinecasinosspelen dot com and nederlandscasinos dot net, with the regulator requesting that Cloudflare shut them down. The company said that it was unable to but offered helpful information to help determine ownership and origin of the websites instead.

Cloudflare and Kansspelautoriteit have used this as an opportunity to build a strong relationship which will now see the company provide the regulator with relevant and possibly actionable information about illegal gambling offers and where they may be originating from, as well as who owns them. The collaboration only concerns what the regulator deems illegal gambling services that are purposefully and harmfully targeting the local market.

All gambling that takes place in the Netherlands must be regulated under the Gambling Act and is overseen by the Kansspelautoriteit. The watchdog has argued that a number of bad actors continue to target the local gambling market purposefully, but these accusations have not always been levelled at nefarious and anonymous third parties.

In fact, the Kansspelautoriteit has butted heads with many credible and well-known companies that have been allegedly also targeting the market. The regulator has handed down a €19,679,000 fine to Gammix Limited in a similar case, which the operator has called "outrageous."

The main issue that the regulator and targeted operators cannot settle on is the manner in which the regulator established wrongdoing. According to companies targeted by such fines, including Blue High House S.A. and LCS Limited, the regulator used VPNs and other means to access their websites when it would not have been possible to do so through a regular Dutch IP.

Kansspelautoriteit has dismissed these complaints. The regulator’s new team-up with Cloudflare is designed to further strengthen its capabilities of monitoring the regulated gambling market, and fend off incursions by illegal operators.