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The contrast with land-based gambling is striking. Casinos in Morocco and Egypt operate within recognised frameworks and, in Morocco, attract international investment. Private online betting remains outside the legal market.

The scale of that unlicensed market is unclear. MDJS’ own estimate of about MAD3.5 billion a year is the only figure available. No comparable public estimate exists for Tunisia or Egypt.

Without a licensing route, these markets remain difficult to measure, tax or supervise. Blocking and criminalisation may disrupt operators, but they do not remove demand. Governments are left trying to suppress offshore betting rather than bring it within a regulated market.

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The report also cites brands targeting a specifically banned vertical or product within a jurisdiction as driving black market activity. While markets across Europe have many examples, one such flagged in the report is that iGaming remains illegal for licensed operators in France.

“The largest black market operators have scaled to create recognisable brands with traffic that can compare to domestically licensed operators,” the report’s authors wrote. “The top group of sites by common owner has a 12% share of traffic, while the largest single brand has 10%.”

Beyond offering crypto payment solutions, a number of black market operators are licensed in “light touch” offshore jurisidictions which use opaque offshore operating structures to help to obscure company ownership and make local enforcement against these companies complex, the report noted.

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The gaming giant left for greener pastures in the US, expecting to benefit from higher valuations in the most liquid equity market. But analysts have noted a similar downward trend in Flutter’s share price over time.

Down around 60% in a year, the risk is it becomes just another mid-tier consumer stock on a bigger exchange. “Deeper water doesn’t help if the current is moving somewhere else,” Corfai’s Ben Robinson recently said of Flutter’s stock price.

Nicole cut her teeth in local news rooms at home in Gibraltar, and helped to establish the peninsula’s first online-only broadcaster.