Interview with ACMA Member, Fiona Cameron
We recently interviewed Fiona Cameron, an authority member of the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) and asked about the challenges facing authorities in stamping out illegal online gambling operators in Australia. Cameron will also be speaking at next month’s Regulating the Game 2022, a five-day education program held at the International Convention Center in Sydney from 7-11 March 2022.
What is the ACMA’s role in gambling regulation?
We enforce the Interactive Gambling Act 2001 (IGA) which prohibits a range of interactive gambling services from being offered or advertised to Australians. This includes online casinos, slots, poker, in-play sports betting and wagering services that don’t hold an Australian licence. While we don’t license operators under the IGA, the IGA gives us powers to investigate and take enforcement action against illegal online gambling operators and advertisers.
Importantly, we are also responsible for the National Self-Exclusion Register which will enable consumers to self-exclude from all licenced online and telephone operators in a single, nationally administered process.
We also regulate gambling advertising by licensed gambling operators on broadcast and internet platforms. Our remit here chiefly involves enforcing rules that apply across all platforms to provide a safe zone for families and children to watch live sport.
What has been your approach to disrupting illegal online gambling?
The ACMA has a strategic approach which includes compliance and enforcement, engagement with entities and other regulators and education and consumer awareness. The underlying driver of our approach is minimising harm to Australian consumers.
We investigate and use a range of enforcement and disruption tools against services that we find have breached the IGA, including referring illegal websites to Internet Service Providers (ISPs) for blocking. We’ve engaged with gambling regulators and government agencies, both domestically and internationally and we use this network to assist in our enforcement and disruption efforts against illegal services. We also run consumer awareness campaigns on digital platforms which highlight the risks consumers face when using illegal and unlicensed gambling services.
What are some of the outcomes of your work?
We’ve seen a significant disruption in illegal services, with over 150 illegal gambling sites withdrawing from the Australian market since we started enforcing the IGA in 2017.
For those services which have not withdrawn, we have taken action to block access to their sites from Australia. Since November 2019, over 375 illegal gambling websites have been blocked by ISPs at the ACMA’s request. As an example of the effectiveness of blocking, in 2020-21 we targeted 55 illegal services for blocking, resulting in a majority experiencing a drop in Australian visitors of at least 90%
We’ve also had success in disrupting illegal gambling services by engaging with third parties that provide essential services to the gambling operators, like the suppliers of games and payment processors. As a result, a number of these have withdrawn their services reducing the games and payment options available to Australian customers on these sites. We’ve also targeted affiliate marketing services that advertise and direct new customers to illegal gambling sites.
What are some of the challenges you face?
We regulate in a dynamic digital market which by its nature crosses international borders. This environment creates a number of challenges. For example, services are able to operate under high levels of anonymity and change their digital footprints quickly and often. There are jurisdictional challenges as many of the illegal services we investigate are based in jurisdictions with minimal, if any, regulatory oversight and more recently, there has been an increase in the use of cryptocurrency on many illegal sites, which creates additional challenges in our investigations.
How effective has collaboration been?
Collaboration is essential to effectively regulating in this online environment. We have developed strong relationships with state and territory gambling regulators and other federal government agencies on the domestic front, and with key international regulatory counterparts. This enables information to be shared, wherever possible, which leads to more effective regulatory outcomes.
As ACMA’s detection and enforcement against illegal gambling operators has evolved, have the operator’s strategies to target and offer gambling products to Australians also evolved? How so?
Many illegal operators continue to use Australian imagery on their web pages to convince consumers they are based here and are offered legally. This is a common strategy and can lead consumers to inadvertently use prohibited or unlicensed online gambling services. It is also common for illegal operators to align themselves to affiliate services which appear to provide independent reviews of the illegal services, with direct links to the sites. More recently we have seen the use of social media and streaming services such as Twitch becoming popular ways for affiliates to target gamblers.
Many operators cease to provide services once we inform them of a breach of the IGA. But of course, there are recalcitrant operators who take steps to continue to offer services to Australians. We see this most clearly when operators launch mirror sites in an attempt to circumvent the blocks imposed on their website. However, even when mirror sites are set up, we can see a significant reduction in web traffic from Australia to these illegal services. And of course, we monitor and block the mirror sites as well. We have also seen some operators remove corporate and licensing information from service websites, in efforts to obfuscate details of the legal entity behind the service and others appear to have moved away from credit card deposits for Australian players in favour of encouraging deposits through vouchers or cryptocurrencies.
A PWC report published in February 2021 Review of unlicensed online gambling in the UK, found the amount gambled with unlicensed operators had more than doubled from £1.4bn to £2.8bn, compared to a similar study in 2019. What is ACMA’s understanding of the size of the Australian unlicensed market and have you observed any emerging issues and trends through your monitoring?
It is of course inherently difficult to quantify illegal activity, so we gather data from various sources to give the best estimate, including from H2 Gambling Capital and Global Betting and Gaming Consultants. According to these data providers, the size of Australia’s unlicensed gambling market has decreased since 2016 (the year prior to the ACMA taking on its expanded responsibilities). For example, the forecast from H2 Gambling Capital for 2022 is A$1.63 billion as compared to A$1.71 billion in 2016.
Of course, COVID 19 has had an impact on gambling behaviour in the past 2 years. The ACMA 2021 Annual Consumer Survey showed that as at June 2021, 11% of Australians had reported participating in online gambling at some stage in the previous 6 months, up from 8% in 2020. Additionally, 16% of Australians who gamble online reported an increase in their gambling frequency compared to before the pandemic.
When it comes to illegal gambling operators - where are you seeing the most threats coming from so far? e.g. online casino, online sports betting, esports betting, online lottery, etc. What do you expect to become the next "biggest" threat as we move into 2022 and beyond?
Based on the complaints we receive and on our monitoring of web traffic to illegal services, online casino services continue to pose the highest risk to Australian consumers and we’d expect this to remain the case. Notably, we have seen an increase in the delivery of these services via apps and new platforms used to market them.
We also receive complaints about products with gambling-like features, such as loot boxes and social casinos, so we do monitor these types of developments which consumers, particularly, parents, are concerned about.
We hear a lot about the risks of Australian customers participating with unlicensed or illegal offshore operators. What does ACMA’s complaint data tell you about the issues Australian customers are experiencing when they gamble with offshore gambling operators?
The majority of our complaints continue to be about online casinos. Consumers consistently raise issues about poor treatment; including unfair play, non-payment of winnings, inability to contact the operator and little or no regulatory oversight. Illegal services use strategies aimed at convincing Australians that they are reputable and well-regulated, using tactics like publishing testimonials by ‘Australian customers’ which refer to big wins, fast withdrawals and excellent customer service to draw customers in. Our digital advertising campaigns are aimed at raising the awareness of consumers to the risks of using these sites.
Turning to your own experience, you bring a depth of commercial and government knowledge to ACMA including senior experience in commercial radio and Screen Australia. Regulators are sometimes criticised for lacking experience and understanding about industry and commercial matters generally, which can lead to blunt policy outcomes and stifling innovation. How has your industry and government experience assisted you to navigate more nuanced policy and positioned you to contribute to ACMA’s role and outcomes?
My background ensures that I am alive to practical commercial considerations, plain English policy making and the benefit of simple and consistent regulation. Don’t get me wrong, we certainly don’t always achieve such lofty aims, but, I am alive to it!
Significantly, the primary purpose of the IGA is harm minimisation and the enhancement of protections for Australian consumers. We don’t have unachievable objectives and look to work with the sector and stakeholders to do the best by consumers. Broadly speaking, those who are up for gambling should at the very least be protected from bad actors.
Our credibility, I think, is greatly enhanced by the interactive gambling team we have established. This seven person strong team, has key regulatory, legal, industry and stakeholder experience. They know what they are doing and are in touch.
The Regulating the Game Course in March next year will gather leading gaming regulators and industry stakeholders from Australia and internationally. What will ACMA be focusing its efforts on in the gambling space over the next year?
We will be focussing on 2 key gambling related activities. The first is the implementation of the National Self Exclusion Register. We’ve appointed an operator and the register is currently in a testing phase and we anticipate it will go live mid-2022. This is a huge undertaking and it is incredibly important to get the word out.
The second area of focus is on gambling affiliate services. These are services that advertise or promote online gambling services as part of affiliate programs most often run by, or for, online casinos. We are focusing investigations into those affiliates which promote illegal gambling services targeting Australia as another means to disrupt the major illegal gambling services in the Australian market. And then there is everything else!
