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Nederlandse Loterij has announced plans to appeal portions of the Lalabet decision, particularly arguing that trust firms have a duty to properly vet their clients.
The operator was also investigating the roles of the same trust firm in relation to Qbet and Skyhills, indicating further legal proceedings may be forthcoming once corporate structures are clarified.
The crackdown on illegal gambling sites coincided with a broader policy debate in The Hague. The Dutch House of Representatives is set to discuss gambling regulation reforms this week.
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Yashin had spent around 15 years building businesses across industries ranging from fashion technology and retail hardware to sneaker cleaning, as well as investing in early-stage technology companies. Yet when he attempted to place a football bet, he found the interface so impenetrable that he eventually headed to a betting shop to ask how to do it.
When he subsequently looked at casino games, something else struck him – the experience did not seem dramatically different from the slot machines he remembered seeing years earlier.
“I started thinking about how to combine the really great monetisation of randomness in casino games with the attention loop of social media platforms,” Yashin says. “The idea was: what if you could bet on the result of a short video or a short TikTok?”
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According to the German Press Agency, the Frankfurt public prosecutor’s office, together with the Frankfurt tax investigation unit, the State Office for the Combat of Financial Crime in North Rhine-Westphalia and Frankfurt police, executed coordinated searches across 11 premises on Tuesday.
Over 100 officers participated in the operation. Authorities seized several high-value vehicles, froze numerous bank accounts and imposed an asset restraint order valued at around €82 million. An arrest warrant was also executed.
Prosecutors allege that five suspects had operated internet-based gambling services without the required German licences from at least July 2021. The volume of bets placed on these platforms reportedly exceeded €5.8 billion between mid-2021 and the end of 2023.
