The ACMA has taken Rhys Edward Jones, Diverse Link Pty Ltd and Brenton Lee Buttigieg to Federal Court for allegedly providing illegal online gambling services.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
Australia.- The Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) has commenced civil penalty proceedings in Federal Court for alleged contravention of the Interactive Gambling Act 2001 (IGA).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It’s taking action against Rhys Edward Jones<\/strong>, who allegedly provided online poker services to Australians from March 2020 to March 2021;\u00a0Diverse Link Pty Ltd<\/strong>, which allegedly provided services from March 2021 to the present; and\u00a0Brenton Lee Buttigieg<\/strong>, who is accused of promoting the business and referring customers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Their operations ran under the name PPPfish but subsequently rebranded to Shuffle Gaming and later Redraw Poker<\/strong>.\u00a0Online poker services are prohibited by Section 5 of the IGA. For violations of the act, individuals can pay up to AU$1.66m in fines per violation, five times more than companies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The ACMA says players were able to join a poker club through a mobile app and could buy chips via bank transfer or bitcoin. These were then credited to their poker club account and could be used to play. Chips could then be exchanged for FIAT currency or bitcoin.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In February, the regulator ordered the\u00a0blocking of 12 offshore gambling websites<\/a>. In November 2021, the ACMA ordered the blocking of\u00a0two illegal offshore lottery websites<\/a>\u00a0for the first time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The ACMA has taken Rhys Edward Jones, Diverse Link Pty Ltd and Brenton Lee Buttigieg to Federal Court for allegedly providing illegal online gambling services.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":176,"featured_media":17395,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"is_press_release":false,"is_interview":false,"is_opinion":false,"focusai_summary":"The Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) has commenced Federal Court proceedings against Rhys Edward Jones, Diverse Link Pty Ltd, and Brenton Lee Buttigieg for allegedly operating illegal online poker services under various brands, including PPPfish and Redraw Poker. These actions contravene Section 5 of the Interactive Gambling Act 2001 (IGA), which prohibits such services in Australia. The case highlights ACMA's stringent regulatory enforcement against unlicensed iGaming operations and the significant penalties for non-compliance.","focusai_entities":"Rhys Edward Jones, Diverse Link Pty Ltd, Brenton Lee Buttigieg, Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA), PPPfish, Shuffle Gaming, Redraw Poker","focusai_location":"Australia","focusai_target_profile":"ceo_executive (0.9), regulator (1.0), compliance_legal (1.0), operator_casino (0.9), affiliate_publisher (0.8), product_ux (0.7), tech_data (0.7), marketing_crm (0.8), payments_fraud_aml (0.9), investor_analyst (0.9), supplier_vendor (0.8), journalist_researcher (0.9)","focusai_suggestions":[{"label":"IGA Enforcement Impact","query":"What are the broader implications of ACMA's civil penalty proceedings under the Interactive Gambling Act 2001 for other unlicensed iGaming operators targeting the Australian market?"},{"label":"Payment Channel Scrutiny","query":"How will the alleged use of bank transfers and Bitcoin for transactions in this case influence future regulatory scrutiny on payment processing channels for iGaming services in Australia?"}],"footnotes":""},"categories":[16336,439,158],"tags":[6093],"class_list":["post-29277","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-australasia-news","category-legal-news","category-slider-home","tag-acma"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/focusgn.com\/asia-pacific\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29277","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/focusgn.com\/asia-pacific\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/focusgn.com\/asia-pacific\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/focusgn.com\/asia-pacific\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/176"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/focusgn.com\/asia-pacific\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29277"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/focusgn.com\/asia-pacific\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29277\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29285,"href":"https:\/\/focusgn.com\/asia-pacific\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29277\/revisions\/29285"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/focusgn.com\/asia-pacific\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17395"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/focusgn.com\/asia-pacific\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29277"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/focusgn.com\/asia-pacific\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29277"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/focusgn.com\/asia-pacific\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29277"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}