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About Smokeem
Some politicians stated their opinion that the legal gambling age in the Netherlands should be increased to 21 from the current barrier of 18 years old.
This isn’t the first time this policy has been mooted in the Dutch parliament. A 2025 bill proposed raising the age for “higher-risk” activities like online slots.
Van Bruggen insisted more time was needed to establish whether an age limit hike to 21 would actually have the adverse effect of pushing young people in the Netherlands towards unlicensed offerings.
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A report commissioned by Evolution as part of its ongoing defamation case again Playtech and Black Cube has reportedly “corroborated” various points made by Black Cube in its investigation.
Within the report, Spectrum alleges “concerns around the availability of Evolution’s games in certain prohibited markets, the regulatory implications of its practices, and the lack of proactive monitoring of its customers”, Playtech has reported.
The report was commissioned by Evolution and was recently unsealed in the ongoing case. Evolution had tried to delay the report’s release, citing confidential and commercial sensitivity.
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He began watching regulators shut down individual gambling sites, only for mirror sites, cloned domains and replacement URLs to emerge in thier place. The problem, he concluded, was not necessarily the individual website. It was the network behind it.
“Why not use the dataset I already have on gambling sites to map the most problematic ones, identify how they are connected and build a deeper picture of the networks behind them?” That thought process eventually gave birth to Trace2Trace.
Trace2Trace is relatively new, but Madsen says its underlying dataset has already grown to around 620,000. And it continues to grow, highlighting the scale of illegal operations in the gambling industry.
