The Dutch gambling regulator Kansspelautoriteit (KSA) is taking action against the arcades and casinos that let a self-excluded reporter through the door on someone else’s identity document, after a video investigation showed entry checks failing at three venues.
The test was carried out by reporter Abel Bijlsma for PowNed, the Dutch public broadcasting association, and published on PowCrime, its new online true-crime video platform. Bijlsma registered himself in the Central Register for the Exclusion of Games of Chance (Cruks), the national self-exclusion database. When he presented his own identity document at the entrance, he was refused. When he presented a colleague’s document, he was admitted at three separate locations.
The KSA published its response on 3 September. “Dat is een ernstig signaal,” the regulator said, calling the finding a serious signal. It said the outcome should not have happened and that arcades and casinos are required to carry out thorough checks.
Where the check broke
Cruks is the register every licensed Dutch operator has to query before giving a player access, whether the player is opening an online account or walking into a venue. The KSA said the register itself did what it is built to do. The query returns an active registration when the person identifies with a valid document of their own.
The failure sat in the step before the database call: the manual comparison of the person at the door with the photograph on the document they hand over. The KSA said access control at land-based venues is a manual process and that fraud cannot always be ruled out. The regulator has already issued guidance on identification and verification under Cruks setting out what it expects at that stage.
Holland Casino, the state-owned operator of the Netherlands’ land-based casinos, said its access control was more extensive than the item suggested.
Parliament asks how often it happens
The item reached the Tweede Kamer within a day. JA21 MP Ingrid Coenradie put written questions to Claudia van Bruggen, State Secretary for Justice and Security, on 2 September.
Coenradie asked how much identity fraud is occurring at casino entrances, what the guidelines are for checking documents at the door, whether venues are obliged to photograph every visitor, how those images are matched against the document presented, what training door staff receive, and what could be improved.
Those questions point at the part of the system that has no technical backstop. Cruks verification is a database lookup with a clear answer. Deciding whether the face in front of you is the face on the passport is a judgement made by a member of staff at an entrance, often at speed.
The enforcement record
The KSA has penalised a venue on this point before. It fined Casino Zoetermeer B.V. €25,000 for admitting players registered in Cruks. A court later reduced the penalty to €21,500.
The regulator has not named the venues it is approaching over the PowNed item, and has not said whether the contact is a compliance conversation or the start of a formal investigation. The KSA can impose administrative fines for Cruks breaches and, in serious or repeated cases, act against an operator’s licence.
Why the door matters
Cruks covers players who have asked to be stopped and players placed on the register at the request of an operator, a relative or the KSA itself. A register that holds up online and gives way at a physical entrance leaves that group exposed at the point where they are standing in front of a machine.
The same logic runs through the wider harm debate in Europe, where excluded and blocked players who cannot use a licensed site often reappear on an unlicensed one. Research put Europe’s illegal online gambling market at €12bn, a figure that depends in part on how well the regulated channel holds its own boundaries.
What to watch
Two things will show how far this goes. The first is whether the KSA’s contact with the venues named by PowNed turns into enforcement files, which would be the regulator’s first move against land-based access control since the Casino Zoetermeer case. The second is van Bruggen’s answers to Coenradie, which will indicate whether the government treats a borrowed passport at a casino door as an enforcement problem for the KSA or as a gap in the rules that needs new requirements on how venues verify who is walking in.
Neither the KSA nor the State Secretary has set a date.
Source: Kansspelautoriteit
