The Ksa suffocates the black market by targeting illegal casino infrastructure 

The hunt for illegal online casinos continues in the Netherlands. By directly attacking hosting providers, search engines, and banks, the Dutch regulator is suffocating the black market thanks to an ultra-efficient network strategy. 

The fight against illegal online casinos continues in Europe. Faced with the ingenuity of illegal operators in bypassing traditional bans, the Dutch regulatory authority (Kansspelautoriteit – Ksa) has just unveiled the first results of an unprecedented technical harassment strategy. 

Instead of exhausting itself in an endless legal chase against ghost casinos often based in distant tax havens, the regulator brought together an industry alliance to methodically cut off all operational access points that allow these sites to exist. 

Anti-illegal gambling coalition 

The core idea is simple: make the black market less accessible, less visible, and financially unviable. 

To achieve this, the Ksa worked with a true anti-gambling alliance that brings together actors who are traditionally isolated: 

• financial institutions, 

• web hosting providers, 

• technology suppliers, 

• search engines, 

• advocacy associations, 

• and representatives of the legal sector. 

Among them, the Keurmerk Verantwoorde Affiliates (KVA), the certification body for responsible affiliates, took an active part in the market clean-up strategy. 

The first figures published by the Ksa demonstrate the effectiveness of this collaborative approach, with around 200 websites broadcasting illegal content rendered completely inaccessible. But the true victory of this alliance is taking place behind the scenes, through the dismantling of the invisible cogs of the underground industry. 

Withdrawal of official game providers 

One of the most significant successes of this operation concerns the game catalog of underground platforms. To attract players and establish a false sense of security, illegal online casinos very often display the most popular and certified slots and live table games. Notably those from Pragmatic Play. 

The Dutch alliance successfully pressured these software creators and game publishers. The result? These providers blocked access to their servers for connections coming from the Netherlands across a series of targeted platforms. Deprived of their flagship titles and bettors’ favorite games, illegal sites instantly lose their attractiveness and credibility with the public. 

Why did they decide to act directly on the providers? 

The average player has a very hard time distinguishing between a licensed site and an illegal site. Illegal casinos use perfect translations, modern interfaces, and official logos to mask their lack of a license. By stripping these sites of the best-known providers, the regulator mechanically breaks user trust. 

The keyword war on Google and the clean-up of advertising 

The second major axis of the alliance concerns traffic acquisition and visibility on search engines. Unlicensed casinos massively exploit algorithm flaws by targeting queries typed by vulnerable player profiles or those seeking to bypass protection systems. The most blatant example in the Netherlands remains the search for “Casino without Cruks”, the Dutch equivalent of our EPIS list. 

The alliance’s working groups, including the KVA, conducted a joint action with Google to stem this phenomenon. The efforts paid off. The visibility of rogue advertisements for illegal casinos has dropped drastically compared to previous years. 

At the same time, the strategy consisted of intelligently occupying the algorithmic space. Media initiatives involved creating informative platforms positioned on these risky keywords. When an internet user types a search to escape moderation tools, they now land as a priority on warning content, prevention guides, and redirections toward the legal circuit, rather than on underground affiliate links. 

Financial flows and hosting: locking the back doors 

To fuel its strategic approach, the Dutch alliance analyzed the systems put in place in other European jurisdictions, notably in the United Kingdom. The British bank Monzo thus presented its feedback on its gambling block option integrated directly into its mobile application. This system allows users to ban any transaction to a gambling operator with a single click. 

The exercise, however, revealed its technological limits. Many illegal casinos disguise the identity of their payment terminals under completely different merchant categories (such as clothing sales or delivery services) to fly under the banks’ radar. 

It is precisely to decrypt these fraud patterns and spot these camouflaged transactions that the pooling of knowledge within the alliance becomes crucial. 

The Ksa keeps the technical specifics of its interventions secret so as not to allow underground networks to adapt their operating methods too quickly. The message sent to the sector is, however, clear: player protection and the sustainability of the legal market now depend on shared vigilance among all web intermediaries, from hosting servers to banking applications. 

Belgium faces the Dutch model 

This strategic shift observed among our Dutch neighbors offers an essential perspective for the gambling market in Belgium. 

The Gaming Commission (KSC) faces strictly identical issues. Illegal platforms actively target Belgian bettors by trying to bypass the EPIS exclusion system or the default deposit limit of 200 euros per week. 

However, the Belgian method still relies heavily on a traditional model: placing sites on an official blacklist, followed by a DNS or IP blocking request addressed to local Internet Service Providers. While this measure remains indispensable, it shows its limits against operators capable of generating dozens of mirror sites (changing the domain extension) in a few minutes to bypass the block. 

With these various measures, the Netherlands proves that a modern regulator can no longer act alone with purely legal tools. To permanently suffocate the black market, Belgium should undoubtedly follow the example of its neighbor.