Dutch regulator finds that the amount of money spent in the illegal market has increased

The Dutch gambling regulator, Kansspelautoriteit (KSA), has released a new Spring 2025 report that looks at how people are gambling in the Netherlands.

The monitoring report shows that the amount of money in the illegal market has increased, but that most players still play with legal providers.

The vast majority (91%) are found to gamble online with legal providers, but it’s stated that more money is spent on the illegal market. 50% of the total amount that the Dutch spend on gambling is spent on illegal parties.

In the last six months, an average of 1.19 million accounts per month were players, which is a slight increase from what was seen in the six-month period before this, when there were 1.1 million.

The number of new accounts has seen an increase in the last quarter too, but it’s said this might not be equal to the number of people gambling as a player can have multiple accounts.

At the start of the year, Kansspelautoriteit announced a fresh drive to crack down on unregulated gambling operators with this being a key focus.

This comes after the Dutch online gambling market opened in October of 2021, with the regulation allowing for players in the country to legally place sports bets and play casino games online.

At the time, the market opened with 10 operators who had been issued an online gambling license.

Then, in October 2024, new protection measures were brought into force which included tighter restrictions on deposits. With this, the deposit threshold has become dependent on the player’s net deposit during a calendar month.

The net deposits cannot exceed €700 ($777) as any further deposits within that calendar month will be blocked. This figure is even lower for young adults aged between 18 – 25 (€300), with the thresholds automatically enacted on the first day of each month.

Young adults was one of the first sections mentioned within the news release about the report, with the KSA highlighting that these are a vulnerable target group. It was found that this age range spends less money on average than the remainder of adults, but they bet relatively more on sports competitions than older age groups.

Featured Image: AI-generated via Ideogram

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