The chair of the Netherlands’ gambling regulator has issued a strong call for cross-border collaboration in the fight against illegal gambling operators.
Michel Groothuizen, Chair of the Kansspelautoriteit (KSA), published a blog following the Netherlands’ annual gambling committee debate, outlining the scale of the problem facing regulators.
Groothuizen painted a stark picture of just how significant the illegal gambling market has become for Dutch players and the wider European gambling landscape.
“Illegal gambling is, in fact, an unprecedentedly large and complex problem. Of every euro a Dutch person gambles away, half goes to the illegal market,” he said.
The KSA chair went further, highlighting the sheer economic scale of illegal gambling operations globally, drawing comparisons to some of the world’s largest economies.
“Anyone examining this industry will see that the turnover of the global illegal gambling market exceeds the GDP of any country, with the exception of the US and China,” Groothuizen noted.
He also challenged the commonly held public perception that illegal gambling operators are simply legitimate foreign businesses occasionally attracting Dutch players through internet freedom.
“The public often holds the image of foreign companies with sound business practices that, thanks to the freedom of the internet, occasionally attract a Dutch player. We must abandon that image,” he added.
Groothuizen stressed that meaningful progress against illegal gambling can only be achieved through coordinated international cooperation and intervention at the European level.
The KSA chair identified social media as a significant complicating factor, with illegal operators increasingly using these platforms as marketing tools to reach Dutch consumers directly.
Despite the challenges, Groothuizen confirmed the Netherlands is actively holding major technology companies accountable for the volume of black market gambling advertisements appearing on mainstream social media platforms.
However, the KSA has openly acknowledged that it cannot tackle this problem alone, and that support from other jurisdictions and regulators is essential to making a genuine impact.
Groothuizen was direct in his assessment of national-level regulation, arguing that relying solely on domestic frameworks is insufficient to address a problem of this global magnitude.
“Inevitably, we need Europe to persuade such parties to cooperate with us in the fight against illegal gambling. In my view, it is naive to cling to the idea that a well-regulated legal national market and a national regulator are sufficient to tackle this problem,” he explained.
The KSA chair further underlined the criminal nature of the networks involved, describing the fight against illegal gambling as one against a coordinated and ruthless global criminal enterprise.
