Portugal's Gambling Regulator Hands the Hunt for Illegal Betting Sites to Software, Under a 19,990 Euro Contract

Portugal's gambling regulator has bought software to hunt for illegal betting and casino websites, moving away from a job its staff have largely done by hand. The SRIJ (Serviço de Regulação e Inspeção de Jogos, the Gambling Regulation and Inspection Service), which sits within Turismo de Portugal (the national tourism authority), has chosen a platform from the French company Sharp Vision, Lusa reported on Monday.

A 19,990 euro direct award

The contract is on BASE, the public procurement portal. Turismo de Portugal signed it on 27 July and it was published on 30 July. It covers a licence to use a platform "supporting the procedures for identifying, notifying and blocking websites" that offer online gambling and betting run by operators without a Portuguese licence. The system is named in the contract as DORIA.

The price is 19,990 euros for 365 days. According to Lusa, it can be extended for a second year if the public bodies involved want to. The contract was awarded directly, without a competition, under article 20(1)(d) of the Código dos Contratos Públicos (Public Contracts Code). That rule allows a direct award for purchases of goods and services when the contract value is below 20,000 euros, so this one sits 10 euros under the ceiling.

What the platform is meant to do

In a statement quoted by Lusa, Sharp Vision said the platform would let the SRIJ move from an essentially manual and reactive approach to permanent, automated digital monitoring using real-time information. It lists four tasks:

• detecting illegal operators whose websites can still be reached from Portugal;
• checking with internet access providers that the SRIJ's blocking orders are actually carried out;
• helping to assemble the evidence needed for administrative offence cases (processos de contraordenação);
• producing market indicators, including the rate at which players are redirected to licensed sites, which the company calls a barometer of how well regulation is working.

The company added that the tool does not replace human judgement. The regulator keeps full power to check and validate the platform's results before it acts.

Cyril Casanova, Sharp Vision's president, told Lusa the aim was to "leave manual mode" and use technology to detect illegal sites and suggest them for blocking. He described Portugal as a pioneer, saying that elsewhere the work is done by hand and only a very small share of the illegal sites accessible in any European jurisdiction can be handled manually. He was also candid about the limits: "when it comes to fighting the illegal market, the ambition must be reasonable", he said, adding that the idea is not to destroy the illegal market completely. Those behind it, he said, use very sophisticated technology to stay ahead of the authorities.

The scale of the problem

The SRIJ already blocks illegal sites in large numbers. By its own count, it had ordered 3,043 sites blocked since 2015, 113 of them in the second quarter of this year alone, and had notified 1,834 operators and sent 77 cases to prosecutors. Each block depends on someone finding the site first, which is the step the new platform is meant to automate.

Sharp Vision says it works in more than six jurisdictions, including in West Africa, and is expanding into the rest of Europe and into South America. For players, the regulator's list of licensed operators remains the safest check before depositing money on any gambling site.