NSW Gaming Regulator calls for higher penalties for repeat offenders

Sponsored Content

BUSINESS NEWS - Australia’s New South Wales (NSW) gaming regulator is calling for higher penalties for multimillion-dollar online betting operators who engage in illegal advertising.

The Liquor & Gaming NSW argues that repeat offenders view fines as simply the cost of doing business, so they do not provide a deterrent.

Liquor & Gaming NSW is responsible for monitoring advertising to detect gambling enticements such as cashback offers. This includes offers on social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.

“Absolutely, fines need to be higher,” said Anthony Keon, chief executive of hospitality and racing in the Department of Enterprise, Investment and Trade.

“We would like to see penalties for repeated behaviour towards the upper end... if they fail to respond to that, we will be discussing with the government to get fines increased.”

The maximum penalty for an offence of this kind is a fine of up to $110 000 per offence. However, since the maximum was raised in 2018, it has never been applied.

In early June 2022, Online Betting provider PointsBet pled guilty to two offences of publishing illegal gambling inducements on its Instagram account and was fined $35 000.

The ad offered $50 cashback bonus bets on the State of Origin and was spotted by a Liquor & Gaming inspector. Around 2 500 reportedly received the ad, but no signups or click-throughs were detected.

Operators can protect themselves against prosecution by implementing affiliate compliance monitoring to ensure they do not fall foul of advertising regulations.

A PointsBet spokesman claimed that the offending ads were due to an 'inadvertent coding error'.

“PointsBet uses geofencing technology... In this instance, an employee entered the wrong HTML coding to the system resulting in the advertising inadvertently being seen in NSW,” he said. They have since been removed.

However, PointsBets previously received a $20 000 fine for the same offences in 2019. The bookmaker is one of seven online gambling operators to have been caught more than once for illegal advertising of this nature in the past four years.

Chief advocate of the Alliance for Gambling Reform Tim Costello said repeat offending would continue while NSW 'lacked fines commensurate with the damage' caused by gambling.

“It’s shocking, and the truth is, the industry has gone upstream and captured regulators and that state capture is reflected in the fines that are just a small cost of doing business for operators,” he said.

“We don’t really have a serious set of sanctions and fines. Gambling inducements can ruin lives, the ripple effects are enormous… when fines are this weak, the state is failing to protect the community.

Anthony Keon vehemently denied the accusation, saying, “I absolutely refute [the claim] the government is captured. We are constantly advocating for courts to issue higher fines, and if fines don’t start to reflect our expectations, we will look at whether we need to increase penalties.

“Clearly, some of these operators think [fines for] gambling inducements are just the cost of doing business, but they are wrong."

Since 2015, Liquor & Gaming NSW has prosecuted 37 cases of prohibited gambling advertising, issuing more than $642 500 in fines. At the time of writing, there are 18 matters before the court targeting illegal gambling inducements.

Costello said such incentives to gamble could ruin lives and urged the government to increase penalties to provide a deterrent to operators making multi-million dollar profits.

“The horse has bolted, and these cosmetic restraints are not stemming the damage. If you had half a million or one million dollar fines, they wouldn’t be doing this.”

With the potential for more severe penalties to be imposed, it is more important than ever that responsible operators ensure their site content and social media ads adhere to compliance regulations.