Australia
SPORTSBET FINED AGAIN FOR ILLEGAL GAMBLING ADS
Just days after the race that stops a nation, Australia’s largest online wagering company Sportsbet has been convicted again of gambling advertising breaches following investigations by Liquor & Gaming NSW.
In Downing Centre Local Court on Friday 5 November, the company was fined $135,000.
Liquor & Gaming’s Compliance Director Marcel Savary said the message was not getting through to some wagering companies who continue to break NSW gambling advertising laws.
“So far this year Liquor & Gaming NSW have started more than double the number of prosecutions compared to last year with 119 different counts of breaching the provisions brought against 14 operators, up from 31 counts against seven operators in 2020,” Mr Savary said.
“Research by the NSW Office of Responsible Gambling in 2020 revealed the vast majority of the community is not happy with the current style of wagering advertising, with 81 per cent believing gambling advertising increases the risk of people developing a gambling problem.
“Participation in most forms of gambling in NSW is declining but online betting is increasing with 70 per cent of all sports betting and 37 per cent of race betting now carried out online.
“Liquor & Gaming NSW consistently expresses concerns to industry about gambling advertising and will continue to monitor compliance with these laws and take strong action for serious and blatant offending,” Mr Savary said.
The matters SportsBet was sentenced for include:
- From October 2020 to March 2021, Sportsbet account holders received prohibited gambling advertisement via emails from Sportsbet after withdrawing consent to receive direct marketing. Repeated attempts to unsubscribe were unsuccessful due to the confusing functionality of the unsubscribe option.
- Between 2 and 24 November 2020, a desktop audit of the Sportsbet.com.au social media accounts (Facebook, Instagram and Twitter) was carried out and prohibited gambling advertisements referring to Treasure Punt were identified.
Under the Betting and Racing Act 1998, it is an offence to publish a gambling advertisement that offers any inducement to take part, or take part frequently, in any gambling activity, including an inducement to open a betting account. It is also an offence to unlawfully provide gambling advertisements directly after the betting account holder has withdrawn consent to receive such advertisements. The maximum penalty for these offences is $110,000.
This is the second time Sportsbet has appeared in court this year for breaching the advertising restrictions. In Downing Centre Local Court on 15 March 2021 Sportsbet was fined $22,000 for wagering advertising breaches.
Government-led programs and campaigns, such as Betiquette and Reclaim the Game, aim to counteract gambling advertising and support those at risk of gambling harm.
Anyone in need of free and confidential gambling harm support can contact GambleAware on 1800 858 858 or visit gambleaware.nsw.gov.au
SportsBet has the right to appeal against the sentence imposed.
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Australia
Feedback Sought on How Public Lotteries are Run in NSW
Liquor & Gaming NSW is seeking feedback from industry, stakeholders and the community on how public lotteries are run in NSW.
The Public Lotteries Regulation 2016 is due to expire on 1 September 2026 and Liquor & Gaming NSW intends to renew the regulation to support the legislative framework for lottery regulation, while ensuring it remains fit for purpose.
Public consultation is a key part of the process and the draft Public Lotteries Regulation 2026 and Regulatory Impact Statement will be open for consultation until Friday 10 July.
It is proposed that the regulation will retain most of the existing provisions with some minor amendments to modernise the regulatory framework, remove outdated provisions and improve clarity, consistency and effectiveness.
Before the draft regulation can be remade, legislation requires a formal process of review be undertaken, which includes consultation with the public, interest groups and industry or businesses likely to be affected by the draft regulation.
It’s important for public lotteries to be conducted properly and in line with community interests and expectations, with appropriate harm minimisation measures.
The regulation supports the legislation by setting the standards around the conduct of public lotteries and puts in place consumer protections for people who buy lottery tickets.
The post Feedback Sought on How Public Lotteries are Run in NSW appeared first on EE Gaming | Global iGaming & Tech Intelligence Hub.
Australia
Former Star Entertainment Executives Mathias Bekier and Paula Martin Disqualified and Ordered to Pay Penalties
The Australian Federal Court has disqualified former Star Entertainment Group Limited executives Mathias Bekier and Paula Martin from managing corporations for six and seven years respectively and ordered them to pay pecuniary penalties for breaching their duties by failing to properly manage serious risks at one of Australia’s major casinos.
The Court ordered:
Mr Bekier, the former Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director, to pay a pecuniary penalty of $700,000 and disqualified him from managing corporations for six years.
Ms Martin, the former General Counsel, Company Secretary, and Chief Legal and Risk Officer, to pay a pecuniary penalty of $400,000 and disqualified her from managing corporations for seven years.
His Honour also ordered that Mr Bekier and Ms Martin pay 45% of ASIC’s costs of the proceeding.
The Court previously found that both Mr Bekier and Ms Martin breached their duties owed to Star Entertainment in relation to their handling of the risks associated with money laundering and criminal activity.
ASIC Chair Sarah Court said: “senior executives have a critical responsibility to identify, escalate and properly manage serious risks within their organisations.
“These failures occurred in a highly regulated environment and contributed to significant governance breakdowns at Star.
“Penalties of this scale reflect the seriousness of their conduct and send a strong message to other senior executives of listed companies that failures of this type are unacceptable.”
ASIC has an enduring enforcement priority focused on governance and directors’ duties failures.
In relation to Mr Bekier, His Honour Justice Lee said:
“Senior executives of casino operators, and public companies conducting enterprises pregnant with risks more broadly, must understand that failures of the kind established by the contraventions may attract substantial personal consequences.”
Further, in respect of Ms Martin he found that “the community is entitled to expect that a solicitor occupying such positions and having such responsibilities, within one of Australia’s largest casino operators, will display professional independence, accuracy and judgment of a high order. The conduct established … represented a very serious departure from those standards” and that
“Ms Martin knew of a miscellany of alarming information pertaining to [an overseas gambling junket] … She was required to report such matters to the Board but failed to do so. This is all the more concerning when considered against the backdrop of Ms Martin being the most senior solicitor employed by Star”; and that
“The more pervasive the failures of governance and culture become, the greater the obligation upon those entrusted with legal and risk responsibilities to insist upon compliance with legal obligations and proper standards of corporate conduct.”
The post Former Star Entertainment Executives Mathias Bekier and Paula Martin Disqualified and Ordered to Pay Penalties appeared first on EE Gaming | Global iGaming & Tech Intelligence Hub.
Anthony Woods
PointsBet Goes All In on Grafana Cloud to Power AI-Driven Observability at Scale
Grafana Labs, the company behind the open observability cloud, announced that PointsBet, one of Australia’s fastest-growing digital wagering operators, has selected Grafana Cloud as its unified observability platform. PointsBet is using Grafana Cloud to consolidate telemetry across its proprietary betting platform, accelerate incident resolution with AI-powered insights and give engineering teams the visibility they need to own and operate their services with confidence.
“Our platform is our product. Grafana Cloud gives us one place to see everything — and the AI tools to act on it fast,” Daniel Lucas, CTO at PointsBet.
Grafana Cloud was selected for its ability to deliver:
• Unified Observability Across Every Data Source: PointsBet’s proprietary platform spans real-time odds calculation, player account management, front-end apps and a custom-built betting engine, all generating high-volume telemetry from multiple sources. With Grafana Cloud, PointsBet can ingest and correlate metrics, logs, traces and profiles in a single open platform, ending the fragmentation that slows incident response. Built on OpenTelemetry and open source foundations including Grafana Loki, Grafana Tempo and Prometheus, there’s no vendor lock-in — just a unified view of the stack. This flexibility is what enables PointsBet’s shift towards a true service ownership model: engineering teams can now observe, understand and act on what they build.
• AI That’s Actually Useful: Grafana Assistant gives PointsBet engineers a context-aware AI co-pilot for investigation and troubleshooting, letting them query telemetry in natural language, navigate dashboards and trace issues to root cause without deep expertise in PromQL, LogQL or TraceQL. Now generally available in Grafana Cloud, Grafana Assistant can run multi-step incident investigations, generate and refine queries on the fly, and surface the right data at the right moment — keeping every action inside the tools teams already use. For a business where live betting windows close in seconds, reducing time-to-resolution isn’t a nice-to-have; it’s a competitive edge.
• Application Observability That Empowers Developers: Grafana Cloud Application Observability provides PointsBet’s teams with end-to-end visibility into how their services perform — surfacing service dependency maps, latency hotspots and the customer impact of every change. By connecting distributed traces, metrics and logs in a unified view, Application Observability helps teams understand not just that something broke, but why and who is affected.
“Observability used to mean drowning in dashboards, alert noise and waiting for someone else to tell you what’s on fire. We chose Grafana Cloud because it brings technology and commercial teams together on the single view building autonomous value streams — and Grafana Assistant means our engineers spend less time asking ‘what’s wrong’ and more time fixing it. It enables the shift from reactive firefighting to teams that genuinely own their services end to end and that helps us build a platform our customers can reliably bet on,” said Saurabh Vyas, Head of SRE, PointsBet.
“Real-time platforms at scale are some of the hardest systems to operate — every component has to perform under pressure, and every signal matters when something goes wrong. PointsBet’s engineering team has built a sophisticated platform, and we’re proud to give their engineers the observability foundation they need to operate it. Open, AI-powered, and built to cut through complexity — that’s exactly what Grafana Cloud is for,” said Anthony Woods, co-founder of Grafana Labs.
The post PointsBet Goes All In on Grafana Cloud to Power AI-Driven Observability at Scale appeared first on EE Gaming | Global iGaming & Tech Intelligence Hub.
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