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The scandal of illegal betting by some Italian football players raises a number of legal issues for analysis.
In recent weeks there has been much talk in the press about the scandal of illegal betting by some Italian football players. The news has focused mainly on the consequences at the level of sports justice for football players who could be suspended from sports activities for longer or shorter periods.
There has been less talk about possible illegality under gambling regulations. Indeed, it would appear that players have been playing on gaming sites that are run without a remote gaming concession issued by the Italian Customs and Monopolies Agency (ADM). This conduct is sanctioned by Law 401/1989, which provides criminal penalties for both gaming operators and players.
Article 4.3 of Law 401/1989 stipulates that “Anyone who participates in contests, games, bets operated in the manner referred to in paragraph 1 [i.e., without a concession on remote games issued by ADM], outside the cases of complicity in one of the offenses provided for therein, shall be punished by arrest of up to three months or a fine of between one hundred thousand and one million lire.” Thus, apart from the limited scope of the sanction, this is a criminally relevant offense that could constitute an even greater crime if other circumstances emerge from the investigation.
In addition, domain names of remote gaming sites without a concession issued by ADM are usually listed among the blocked sites on the website of the Italian Customs and Monopolies Agency. In that case, unless a player hides his IP address via a VPN, it is not possible from the Italian territory to access the inhibited domain names because access is blocked by Internet Service Providers. It follows that anyone attempting to access these sites will see an information page from ADM notifying them of the reasons for disabling access. What is interesting, however, is that the gambling sites involved in the illegal betting scandal appear not to be among the inhibited sites.
Another peculiarity of the situation is that football players have claimed to have accrued multimillion-dollar debts on these gambling sites. However, on most gaming sites it is only possible to transfer funds ton the gambling account with payment systems such as credit cards, wire transfers or vouchers, and it is expressly forbidden to play on debit.
The above depicted shows how:
- the illegal gambling activities in which players were involved went far beyond simply placing some bets on sites without a license issued by ADM; and
- the failure of the Italian legal gaming system because these sites became popular without police investigations being conducted and ADM including them in the list of inhibited sites.
In recent years it seemed that the market for illegal gambling sites had shrunk significantly, while now we are talking about a market whose value was estimated in € 25 billion. The resurgence of illegal gaming sites is, in my opinion, due to the introduction of the Italian ban on gaming advertising, which has effectively placed legal and illegal sites on the same level in terms of communication to the public. In both cases, in fact, advertising is banned and sites must be found solutions, sometimes not entirely transparent, to reach customers.
The scenario is expected to get even worse with the new Italian remote licenses that are expected to have an initial auction price of 6 million euros that could convince many gaming sites to prefer (or be forced) to operate in illegality in order to survive.
On this topic you can read the article “The Future of Remote Gambling in Italy: Opportunities or Threats for Operators?”
Photo by Joshua Hoehne on Unsplash
