Netherlands goes after Sarah Eternal in illegal gambling case

The Netherlands has gone after another gambling operator which the country’s regulator, the Dutch Gambling Authority, insists has been operating without a license to offer games of chance. Sarah Eternal has been operating the casinosky dot com website, which has offered the aforementioned products without the necessary license from the regulator.

As a result, the regulator has requested Sarah Eternal to stop providing access to Dutch players to the casinosky website. Failing to comply would result in a fine of €280,000 accumulated on a weekly basis up to a total of €840,000. The Dutch Gambling Authority has been relentless in collecting and issuing fines against operators it has deemed to be operating without the necessary paperwork.

The regulator has been targeting a number of such operators in the Netherlands. Some operators have complied, while others have insisted that although access had been blocked, the Dutch regulator allegedly used underhand practices to gain access from a Dutch IP and issued a stiffer penalty still.

For its part, the regulator has been steely in its determination to ensure that operators that may be available to local players but do not have a license withdraw their offers through IP blocks. The regulator has not hidden that it does everything in its power to test whether any safeguards put down by a casino could be dodged by determined players.

The Dutch watchdog noted that upon inspection of casinosky, its inspectors were in fact able to create accounts and participate in games of chance. The issue, the regulator explained, was that the inspectors did not hide that they were from the Netherlands when they were registering.

The KSA, as the regulator is known by its Dutch acronym, has shown no leniency in cases where it has thought that a party is at fault or breaching the country’s gambling regulation. Just in the space of several weeks, the watchdog has gone after Casbit Group NV, while also putting pressure on DigitalOcean to stop offshore gambling sites from targeting Dutch customers.

The authority also teamed up with Cloudflare to beef up nationwide protection against illegal gambling by blocking access to unauthorized websites, and the regulator also issued an eye-watering €19,679,000 penalty to Gammix Limited, which the company described as "outrageous."

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