The gambling regulator said Equinox Dynamic and Domiseda and Partners were illegally targeting Dutch players.

The Netherlands.- The Dutch gambling regulator Kansspelautoriteit (KSA) has issued fines to Equinox Dynamic and Domiseda and Partners after finding that they were targeting customers in the Netherlands without a local igaming licence. They’ve each been fined €900,000.

Equinox is based in Curaçao, while Domiseda is from Slovakia, but the fines relate to the same website, Orientxpresscasino.com. The KSA said the two companies were providers for the site.

Although neither company has a Dutch licence, the KSA said that players from the Netherlands could play online casino games on the sites, view the site in the Dutch language and make deposits and withdrawals using Dutch payment methods. The site also had a Dutch IP address.

Equinox said it had now taken steps to block Dutch players from accessing the site in order to comply with Dutch law, but the KSA said the breach had already taken place. It also said there were no safety measures on the site, including no age verification to ensure that customers were not minors.

The KSA said: “A licensed provider of online games of chance incurs costs applying for and maintaining a licence that illegal providers of online games of chance do not have to incur. In addition, illegal providers do not pay any tax in the Netherlands and are not restricted in the conduct of their business by the strict rules of the Betting and Gaming Act and the associated licensing regulations.

“This allows illegal providers to offer games of chance that are prohibited for licence holders or offer higher prices and bonuses.”

KSA chairman René Jansen said: “The objective is to create a safe environment for people who want to gamble online. This includes taking strict action against illegal providers.”

Bingoal fined for Dutch self-exclusion failings

Last week, the KSA fined the online gaming operator Bingoal €350,000 for breaching the Netherlands’ self-exclusion rules. It failed to check the Netherlands’ Cruks system when signing up new players.

Consulting Cruks has been mandatory since the launch of the regulated online gambling market in the Netherlands in October 2021, although it has suffered some outages. Bingoal’s failure occurred over three days in June 2022 because its public key infrastructure (PKI) certificate, which operators need to consult the database, had expired.