Four in Ten Portuguese Online Bettors Are on Unlicensed Sites, and Two Thirds of Them Say They Are Not
Respondents ticked the platforms they had used, then were asked directly. The gap between the two answers is the finding. Parliament takes up the ten-year-old gambling law on Thursday.
About four in every ten people who bet online in Portugal are doing it on platforms that hold no licence here, and most of them appear not to know it. That gap between what players do and what they think they are doing is the finding at the centre of a study released on Wednesday, two days before Parliament takes up the subject.
The research was carried out by Aximage for the Associacao Portuguesa de Apostas e Jogos Online, which represents eight of the nineteen operators licensed to run online gambling in Portugal: Betclic, Bwin, Esc Online, Casino Portugal.pt, Solverde, Betano, Bacana Play and Pokerstars. It rests on a thousand interviews with people registered on online gambling platforms.
The measurement trick, and what it exposed
Respondents were shown a list of platforms and asked to tick the ones they had played on in the past year. Nearly 40 percent ticked at least one unlicensed site. Only 19.8 percent said outright that they had used an illegal platform.
Narrowing to the group who had ticked an unlicensed operator, 67 percent went on to say they had not played on an illegal platform, or did not know whether they had. Because the list could not include every site in existence, the association argues the real figure is higher than 40 percent.
Bonuses are the main draw, followed by better odds, a wider range of games and greater anonymity. That last one carries an obvious consequence: anonymity is what a minor needs, and what somebody who has excluded themselves from the licensed market for addiction reasons needs. Younger players are the age group most exposed to unlicensed sites.
Money follows the same split. Seventy-one percent of all online players spend up to 50 euros a month. Among those on unlicensed platforms, close to 38 percent spend more than that.
A market the size of the legal one
In June, the Economy Minister put the value of illegal online gambling in Portugal at around 24 billion euros, roughly the size of the regulated market itself. The association's president, Ricardo Domingues, describes the past few years as a "normalisation" in which "the difference between regulated operators and illegal operators is a mere licence".
It does not know how many unlicensed platforms are operating, because closing one tends to produce another under a new name, "possibly with the same shareholders and the same team". Its estimate runs to "hundreds or thousands". The four unlicensed operators most often identified by respondents have appeared in the top fifteen for seven consecutive years, even though URLs have been blocked and cases opened. During this year's World Cup the association logged and reported 500 instances of unlicensed sites being promoted, mostly through social media advertising and sponsored influencer content, which Domingues says has carried no criminal consequence.
What the industry wants, and what Parliament will hear
Its first proposal targets payments. Unlicensed operators, Domingues says, reach Portuguese consumers through MB Way, multibanco and bank-to-bank tools, which means that "illicit operators always use an entity licensed by the Bank of Portugal". Blocking those channels would need the central bank's involvement. The second proposal is to widen the regulated catalogue, which the gambling regulator SRIJ validates and on which sporting federations must be heard: in a decade of regulated betting, one new category of game has been added.
The association resists an outright ban on gambling advertising, arguing it would push players further towards the illegal market, but says it is open to "moderating the message" and is preparing a self-regulation initiative.
The government promised a rewrite of the decade-old online gambling law for the summer and has published nothing. Parliament rejected a Livre bill in April that would have doubled the minimum self-exclusion period from three months to six and capped advertising; the Socialists filed their own version in June. Livre brings the subject back to the floor on Thursday.
