Romania Releases Remote Gambling Blacklist

Romania has banned 48 online gambling sites for illegally operating on its online gaming market.

Romania’s gambling regulator National Office for Gaming (ONJN) has released the country’s first remote gambling blacklist that includes almost fifty websites that offer online gambling services to players from Romania.

The country’s National Office for Gaming has blacklisted 48 domains in total that have been awarded a 90-day period to pay taxes of 20% on gross gaming revenue earned in Romania over the past five years until the 1st of August, 2015.

The gambling law in Romania has recently been published alongside a list of documents needed for applying for an online gaming licence for organising remote gaming activities in the country. By the end of 2014, Romania has increased the fees for acquiring remote gambling licence in the country as well.

The recent legislative changes included the demand for operators to pay the tax unless they plan to leave the Romanian online gambling market. Even though operators didn’t take these new laws seriously, the country surprised everyone by posting its list of banned websites. Among the banned casinos featured on the Romanian government site are found several casinos owned by Casino Rewards such as Intertops and Slotland.

Romania Issued Temporary Gaming Licences that are Valid until 31st of December

Besides the long list of blacklisted websites that were operating illegally on the Romanian gaming market, there are some major operators such as bwin, PokerStars and Bet365 that are still negotiating the retrospective tax. William Hill is an operator whose name didn’t appear on either of the lists since its operations in Romania ended on the 1st of June, 2015.

However, NetBet, Winmasters and Stanleybet are operators that were approved for offering their services to customers from Romania. They were given temporary licences last week and hence releasing the blacklist is considered a way of showing to others that Romania is very serious in its intentions to regulate remote gaming.

These temporary Romanian remote gambling licences are valid until the 31st of December, 2015, while the 10-year licence application is in the process of preparation. The formal framework for remote gaming licensing in Romania is not yet finished and it cannot be completed until the European Commission mandate standstill period is over. Therefore, everyone can expect full licences to start being issued after 10th of July, 2015.

It was also announced that the Romanian gaming regulator will soon publish a list of conditions that gambling operators have to meet in order to have their websites removed from the blacklist.

Romania Follows the Steps of Latvia, Bulgaria and Hungary

Romania is not the only country that has decided to publish a blacklist with websites that were illegally operating on its remote gaming market. Three other countries have done the same months ago and those countries are Latvia, Bulgaria and Hungary.

Latvia has first published such list in August, 2014, and since then the country has banned 144 online domains from serving players from Latvia. In September, 2015, Bulgaria and Hungary, on the other hand, updated their blacklists by adding 10 and seven new gambling sites respectively.