Michel Groothuizen, the Chairman of the Board of the Kansspelautoriteit, the Dutch gambling regulator, says the Netherlands can’t beat illegal gambling on its own. In a blog published on September 11, he wrote that half of every euro Dutch players gamble goes to the illegal market, and that the fight needs clout at European level.

The post followed the annual gambling committee debate in the Dutch parliament, where player protection, fewer license holders and a faster, wider advertising ban all came up. Groothuizen welcomed a lot of what he heard, including support from MPs for powers to block illegal websites. What he missed, from almost every speaker, was any focus on “our international clout.”

A Market Bigger Than Most Economies

Groothuizen didn’t soften the scale. He wrote that the turnover of the worldwide illegal gambling market is bigger than the GDP of any country except the US and China, and that unlicensed operators paying no Dutch tax cost the country more than €500 million a year.

The money isn’t what worries him most. In his view, the worst part is that these operators take no responsibility for their players at all.

Targeting People Who Asked to Be Blocked

He gave two examples. The KSA recently flagged a website carrying gambling ads while posing as 113.nl, the Dutch suicide prevention helpline. And most illegal operators actively target people who have already signed up to Cruks, the national self-exclusion register, with a simple pitch: get around your gambling ban and keep playing with us.

Why Fines Don’t Work

Regulators can hand out penalties running into the tens of millions of euros, Groothuizen wrote, but those are a fraction of the tax the same companies would have paid on their profits if they had been legal. Worse, the targets change their legal structure faster than they pop up. When the KSA does find out who they are, they often turn out to be based in offshore jurisdictions such as Comoros that are outside the reach of Dutch civil and criminal enforcement.

So the regulator goes after the infrastructure instead. It works to make illegal sites harder to see and find, and to put barriers in the way of payments to them. It’s pressing the big tech companies not to let their platforms and search engines serve this kind of crime, and it is talking to the financial sector. “If you can’t stake money and you can’t cash out winnings, the fun of gambling wears off quickly,” he wrote.

The Case for Europe

That’s where the Netherlands runs out of reach. “Against these globally operating tech and financial companies, the Netherlands is simply far too small,” Groothuizen wrote. “We inevitably need Europe to get such parties to work with us in the fight against illegal gambling.”

He called it naive to believe that a well-regulated national market and a national regulator are enough. “We are fighting a worldwide network of ruthless criminal organizations with dedicated neighborhood police officers, when we should actually be deploying an international investigative service.”

The Timing Is Loaded

The blog landed in a busy week. Earlier that week, the Financial Action Task Force published a report on the risks of gaming and gambling, drawn from 80 jurisdictions, finding that in many places illegal markets “rival or even exceed the size of legal gambling markets.” FATF President Giles Thomson urged governments to crack down on illegal and offshore operators and boost international cooperation.

A Euromat study puts the net revenue of Europe’s illegal online gambling market at €12 billion in 2025, about 25% of the whole sector, three times its 2019 level.

Licenses Run Out Next Month

The Dutch market is also heading into a reset. The online licenses granted in September 2021 run for five years, so they expire on October 1, 2026, and the KSA has updated its rules for operators applying to renew. The licensed online casinos applying to renew will be doing it in a market where, by the regulator’s own count, half of every euro still goes to illegal sites.

Groothuizen ended the blog with a warning aimed at the Dutch parliament: real impact requires clout at European level, and that awareness doesn’t yet seem to be widely shared in the Tweede Kamer.