The house always wins. But if the house allows some to lose excessively, the Dutch regulator KSA might investigate it to see if it is failing to implement “duty of care.”
Dutch regulator KSA Chairman René Jansen December 21 told an audience of the Amsterdam Gambling & Awareness Congress 2022 that his agency has begun investigating operators that it feels are falling down on the job of protecting their consumers.
It was an audience primed to hear such a message since the Congress’s agenda largely concerned itself with gambling harm in the country.
Jensen said KSA wants to impose maximum limits on gaming spending. As it stands, players must set their own deposit limits but there is no maximum set by the government. Jensen wants to change that.
The chairman said some operators have failed in “duty of care” for customers. He declared, “We have also seen other excesses that raise questions about how providers deal with their duty of care. I am talking about excessive financial losses for players – tens of thousands of euros – in a short period of time, without any decisive action being taken by the provider concerned. The KSA has therefore launched a broad investigation into the implementation of the duty of care.”
Jensen also talked about the opening of the online market in 2021, which he said, has not increased the numbers of gamblers and that the figures don’t yet indicate whether online gaming has led to increased harm. He is waiting for figures from the National Alcohol and Drugs Information System to create “a more complete picture.” He added that only some people with a gambling addiction problem seek treatment.
He also discussed the calls for regulation or even bans on gambling advertising. Such calls arose after ads proliferated on TV, radio and online after the online market was legalized.
He said, “The opening up of the market and the number of providers trying to secure a place on the market often leads to a kind of ‘overkill’ in such an initial phase, before normalization takes place.”
