Italian regulation board, the Independent Administration of State Monopolies, or if you’d prefer the more authentic Italiano version – L’Amministrazione Autonoma dei Monopoli di Stato (AAMS) – has declared that by a new law, all financial institutions in Italy need to report every transaction made by players on blacklisted online casino websites.
The news comes after the AAMS reopened it’s market for new licensees and its Chief, Francesco Rodano, said recently that it wanted to put in place measures backed by a new law to make all financial records available to the government. Looks like it got its way – as all financial institutions, including banks will now be required to turn in the contact information of online gamers.
This isn’t an Orwell novel, why do this? Well, it is chiefly a crackdown on the growing number of unlicensed online casino operations in Italy. To make sure people are safe, the AAMS say it wants to free Italy’s internet gambling industry from unregistered and illegal online gambling operators completely and is warning customers to stay away for these sites. The move is also in a bid to prevent a similar situation of what happened to gaming site Full Tilt Poker in the Black Friday indictments earlier this year.
Italians are going to have to stay extra vigilant when gaming online from now on, and double check that the sites they use to gamble are licenced. If not, they may have the Italian government knocking on their door. However, that may prove difficult, as illegal online websites are hard to ignore when they offer better odds and more variety. The freedoms of the internet gambler are being eroded by the Italian government in this Big Brother-esque move. Though the government feel Italy has a good system that is generating a lot of money for tax revenue and the AAMS will do whatever it can to ensure that doesn’t stop.
