PlayCity has blocked over 3,500 illegal sites in a year and reduced the blocking period from 10 days to one. However, the illegal operators themselves are adapting faster than the state can react.
PlayCity has blocked over 3,500 illegal sites in a year and reduced the blocking period from 10 days to one. However, the illegal operators themselves are adapting faster than the state can react.
This was announced in an interview with Forbes by the head of PlayCity, which is the main regulator of gambling operators.
According to him, blocked operators create dozens of mirror sites per day — and some of them do not appear in the public domain at all. Instead, players receive personal links to new mirrors directly — through closed channels in Telegram.
Such resources, according to Novikov, are practically impossible to track and block using standard methods. A significant part of illegal sites is also hosted on pirated movie platforms, which actually exist due to gambling advertising.
Novikov admits that a purely technical blocking does not solve the problem. According to him, without changes in legislation, the share of the legal market is unlikely to exceed 50%. The illegal segment may still account for up to half of the entire gambling market in Ukraine.
