SBC News Voice of the Sports Betting Industry
The Autorité Nationale des Jeux (ANJ), France’s gambling authority has updated its framework related to how operators should protect minors and players at risk of excessive or pathological gambling.
The French gambling regulator said the framework was set up to implement a sustainable and recreational business model among land-based and online operators in the country and while new studies set to be carried out this year should provide updated figures.
The authority cited that between 2014 and 2019, the number of “moderate risk gamblers” had stabilised, but was still at a high level of 1 million people.
However, it added that the number of excessive and problem gamblers had risen significantly over the same period, affecting almost 370,000 people in 2019, compared with 200,000 in 2014. There has also been evidence that minors have been gambling.
ANJ noted, therefore “the prevention of excessive or pathological gambling, and, beyond that, the protection of gamblers, appears to be a major challenge for the regulatory policy”.
The regulator outlined its objective as maintaining “gambling within a long-term perspective of recreational gambling, understood as the occasional, moderate and controlled practice of a leisure activity, in keeping with the personality and financial capacity of the individual who indulges in it”.
The authority has set up a number of guidelines that operators will have to prioritise and conform to, but also highlighted the fact that even if the relevant legal frameworks were complex, the aim is to enable a flexible and quick implementation of the measures by the operators.
All operators will be subject to checks throughout the year and will have to submit their action plans from September onwards.
ANJ has also warned French players about the risk of fraudsters impersonating well known French casino brands on Facebook and using their brands to market themselves to potential customers.
In November, major casino groups such as Barriere and JOA Groupe filed complaints against the authors of advertisements that used their names and logos to advertise online casino sites claiming to be part of the group.
JOA said that since November 18 several of its French land-based casinos had been used in misleading adverts across a number of social networks, but in particular on Meta’s Facebook.
ANJ said the operating mode was “always the same”: set up and promote the casino brand via a recently-created fake user account on Facebook with “photos and logos bearing the name of the French casino establishment, most often associated with the terms ‘online casino’” (casino en ligne in French).
Players are then presented with links redirecting them to fake App Store or Google Play download pages which then redirect them to illegal casino sites.
