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While the intention is to protect vulnerable households and ensure welfare is spent on essential needs, proposed measures are being complicated by legal, technical and privacy obstacles.
Harris Tsangarides, executive director of the Gaming & Casino Supervision Commission, said his department had noticed spikes in gambling activity coinciding with GMI payment dates, prompting the regulator to consider “technical solution” to cross-reference GMI beneficiary lists with casino membership records.
An issue raised by Giannis Vasiliadis, director of WBAS, was the limited access to recipients’ banking information. This limited data can hint at suspicious activity but cannot conclusively verify gambling transactions.
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“You can try to stop gambling, but then you go onto foreign gambling sites and crypto casinos and they keep appearing,” Madsen says.
He began watching regulators shut down individual gambling sites, only for mirror sites, cloned domains and replacement URLs to emerge in thier place. The problem, he concluded, was not necessarily the individual website. It was the network behind it.
“Why not use the dataset I already have on gambling sites to map the most problematic ones, identify how they are connected and build a deeper picture of the networks behind them?” That thought process eventually gave birth to Trace2Trace.
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“The regulatory failures are unhelpful but perhaps the sheer number and regularity of them has made them less remarkable, such that they become ‘wallpaper’,” Waugh says.
He argues that some lawyers and licensees believe the Commission’s presentation of cases is detached from the operational reality but feel they have little option other than to accept the “regulator’s truth” when settling.
“The Commission’s approach to reporting may well create the inaccurate impression that the industry is inherently non-compliant,” he adds. A more balanced account might place failures alongside the majority of licensees that pass assessments or lead on customer wellbeing, although Waugh considers such a shift unlikely.
