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Under the campaign banner #PlaySafeAfrica, each day of this week will focus on a specific aspect of safer gambling. These include responsible gambling, personal limits and the prevention of underage gambling.

The week will feature a coordinated programme of engagement between regulators and the industry, as well as public education and digital awareness activities.

Peter Kesitilwe, CEO of the AiA, said the industry’s growth must be matched by a stronger focus on player protection, highlighting the need for greater collaboration between regulators and operators.

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In Sweden, Spelinspektionen recently flagged affiliates and social media as key channels for black market advertising and how affiliate networks redirect search traffic towards unlicensed operators.

Regulators have so far focused mainly on monitoring paid advertising. In Germany, the GGL credited an updated Google ad policy with reducing black market visibility. Yet, it acknowledged that illegal operators could still achieve visibility in organic search through SEO manipulation. 

This points to a wider shift towards addressing organic search signals and domain-level practices such as doorway pages, an issue also raised in the UK, where research has linked black market migration to search-driven promotion and SEO exploitation.

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A CEO of a prominent operator in the DRC last year told iGB the tax system largely operates on a declaration basis of how much operators report to the government.

“Operators do pay, yes, but they pay whatever suits them,” they said. “In other words, we effectively pay what benefits us. All the while, the state has no means of monitoring its regulatory policies.”

In response to these issues, earlier this year the DRC Ministry of Finance outlined plans for a new gambling monitoring platform to enhance its supervision of the sector.