Esmee Ipema, a well-known personality among Dutch television viewers, is using her fame to promote gambling platforms that operate outside the legal framework.
2024-25 was a financially tumultuous year for the UK Gambling Commission. Its overall expenditure rose by almost half, an unprecedented increase largely attributed to legal costs associated with litigation around the fourth National Lottery licence.
No age verification, no license, but betting with autoplay was fully available. For thousands of Dutch people, it was child’s play to gamble on banned sites. Now, the foreign gambling company Starscream Limited is being presented with the bill: a fine of over 4.2 million euros.
They lost thousands of euros in just a few clicks. Young adults were given free rein to keep gambling at ComeOn casino. The Kansspelautoriteit is now intervening and imposing a fine of 750,000 euros.
In the Netherlands, gambling is a growing part of everyday life, but the mechanisms involved, the risks and the means of prevention are often poorly understood. That’s why OpenOverGokken.nl has launched new educational content to explain gambling in simple language, accessible to everyone, without minimising the risks or dramatising the practices.
With gambling on the increase in cafés and bars in the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, a new bill aims to tackle unauthorised gaming terminals and clarify a legal framework deemed obsolete.
Can hormonal variations in women influence their gambling behaviour? That’s precisely what British researchers set out to find out in a ground-breaking study that could revolutionise our understanding of addiction.
Gaming1 has made 42 redundancies at its digital technology centre. The decision is all the more controversial given the company’s flourishing business, while at the same time boasting a sustained recruitment policy.
As European countries tighten up their national frameworks, a common dynamic is emerging: shared technical standards, similar control tools, increasing use of artificial intelligence and closer cooperation between regulators.
“They pretend to follow the rules, but meanwhile, they earn billions.” While dozens of countries ban gambling advertisements, Meta simply keeps selling them. In India, Malaysia, and the Philippines, among others, Facebook and Instagram are running at full speed in an illegal advertising circuit.
The National Gaming Authority (ANJ) has analysed and approved operators’ promotional strategies for 2026. It has imposed new constraints to limit the increase in advertising budgets and reduce the risks associated with overexposure of players.
In 2025, the Gaming Commission (GC) increased the number of updates to its blacklist of unauthorised sites. More than 160 sites were blocked during the year.
The gambling platform Polymarket has announced that it will not pay out to users who placed bets on a US invasion of Venezuela, despite the spectacular arrest of President Nicolás Maduro by US troops. This decision has angered users who thought they had won a million-dollar jackpot.
The biggest names in the gaming industry took a few minutes at the start of the year to share their predictions. 2025 was not an easy year for the gambling sector, and 2026 doesn’t look like it will be any simpler.
At the beginning of 2026, DraftKings, a major player in online sports betting and gambling, announced a new collaboration with Mindway AI to improve player safety and education.
In an incisive opinion column published on Legaal Nederlands Casino, expert Armijn Meijer draws a disturbing parallel between the trading card industry, in particular the Pokémon card game, and the psychological mechanisms of the casino. Meijer points the finger at the impunity enjoyed by franchises such as Pokémon, which market dopamine in sachets to young people.
