Russia cracks down on international betting websites

ia’s telecommunications regulator, the Roskomnadzor has announced it has reached a preliminary agreement with several search engine providers to block its local residents from accessing unlicensed international betting operators' websites.

Last week, the Russian government authorised the Roskomnadzor to demand that Russian facing search engines including Yandes, Mail.ru, Ultika and Sputnik remove ‘blacklisted’ remote operators from their results pages and deny access to Russian citizens.

This latest restriction follows the government introducing measures to ban Russian banks and online payment processors from accepting transactions from online bookmakers with foreign IP addresses.

Earlier this year Russian premier Vladimir Putin signed two new pieces of federal legislation into law with the aim of cracking down on Russian citizens accessing these sites.

The first of which requires Russian internet service providers to block access to all mirror sites of blacklisted domains, while the second enforces strict new curbs on the use of tools to circumvent these restrictions such as proxy tools known as ‘anonymisers’ and virtual private networks (VPN) by Russian citizens.

These new laws are set to take effect on 1 October and 1 November, respectively. In advance of these legal changes a number of international operators, including BetVictor, Betfair, Unibet and BettingExpert have already left the Russian online gambling market, with more set to follow over the coming months.

At present, Russia has only six licensed online betting operators: Liga Stavok, Winline, 888.ru, 1XBet, Leon.ru and BKfon.ru all of which have agreed to comply with all Roskomnadzor provisions and government regulations.