New German gambling regulator blocks Lottoland

The measure is the new German gambling regulator’s first enforcement action.

Germany.- The new national gambling regulator, Gemeinsamen Glücksspielbehörde der Länder, has announced its first regulatory enforcement action. The regulator said last month that it would begin adopting IP blocks as part of its strategy and it’s now announced Lottoland as its first target.

The regulator has ordered the blocking of www.lottoland.com, www.lottohelden.de and www.lottohelden.com. The GGL has the power to impose penalties against internet providers who do not comply with its order.

It said that Lottoland had been “offering illegal gambling” to German players “for years” through its lottery betting operations, which allow players to bet on the results of a lottery instead of buying a ticket for the draw.

The GGL said: “These offers cannot be permitted under the Interstate Treaty on Gambling and have already been prohibited. However, they can still be reached online. For this reason, the first legal steps taken by the joint gaming authority of the federal states are aimed at stopping Lottoland’s offers through the administrative procedure for IP blocking.”

At an online press conference, GGL leaders Ronald Benter and Benjamin Schwanke said the regulator would “block the offers of ineligible lottery betting operators” as part of its measure to protect the licensed gaming offer in Germany.

They said the GGL aimed to make sure that unlicensed online gambling “is not worthwhile” for operators in the long term. They say they expect to see “visible results against the black market within six months.”

They noted that the regulator’s enforcement procedures would be prioritised according to information received via the regulator’s new centralised complaints and whistleblowing system that the public can use to report ‘irregularities’ with licensed gambling operators and advertising violations as well as suspicions of illegal gambling.

Schwanke said: “The priority in combating the black market is enforcement against providers who are not willing to regulate. We will remove players from the market who do not comply with the rules of the Interstate Treaty on Gambling, who have not applied for a licence or who have been rejected. The criteria for prioritisation include market size, awareness and advertising behaviour/volumes.”

More details of German regulator’s planned enforcement strategy

The GGL has said that it plans to implement payment blocking as well as IP blocking, ideally with the collaboration of service providers.

Schwanke added: “We are interested in collaborative cooperation with payment service providers, but we can also initiate appropriate administrative procedures if the payment service provider does not meet its obligations.”

The regulator will also make reports to tax authorities and will lodge criminal charges by working with legal authorities in its host state, Saxony-Anhalt, where relevant. Under the latter measure, the GGL would pass its market knowledge of providers and their corporate affiliations to the state prosecutor’s office.

It has proposed the creation of a special public prosecutor office in Halle specifically to oversee prosecutions for unlicensed gambling.

Schwanke said that with all of these measures combined, the regulator had “effective instruments for enforcing order.”

Based in the German state of Saxony-Anhalt, the GGL was created under the federal treaty on gambling, which established a federal regulated online gambling market from last July. It was not due to be fully up and running until January 1, although it launched the GGL website in February.

The regulator has named Nadja Wierzejewski, head of gaming supervision in the state of Rheinland-Pfalz since 2008, as the head of the department responsible for tackling illegal gambling and its promotion.

She will be responsible for Germany’s national gaming supervision system, LUGAS. The system will compile data on players’ gambling across all licensed operators so as to make it possible to enforce a deposit cap across all operators that a player gambles with.

For now, Saxony-Anhalt’s State Administration Office remains the interim licensing authority. To date, it has announced the approval of twelve online slot and poker licences.

Germany’s new gambling legislation came into force exactly a year ago, on July 1, 2021. Since then 71 applications for online slots and poker licences have been submitted. With the process taking so long, some eight applications have actually been withdrawn – including that of Kindred’s Unibet, which has turned its back on Germany for now due to the slow licensing progress and the tight restrictions in the regulated market.