Is Gambling Legal In Poland
Online gambling activity in Poland is regulated by the Gambling Law of 2009. The act introduces stringent prescriptions regarding online casinos while leaving the word of European Union regulation.
- In Ukraine, Switzerland, Russia, Poland and the Czech Republic may have all officially banned online casinos, however gambling on foreign casino sites is overlooked. Only Turkey represents a problem since it is a Muslim country and therefore gambling isn’t tolerated.
- It is illegal to participate in unlicensed gambling in Poland. It is also illegal to participate in any gambling held abroad while the player is located in Poland. Both acts are prosecuted as fiscal criminal offences, 13 but in practice this mostly concerns prosecuting participants, which is much easier for the authorities.
While progress has been made and online gambling in Poland is now legal – with increasing avenues for the hobby provided by the state – there’s a long way to go before it evolves into a free market.
Over the previous decades, gambling in Poland was regulated by Act on Games and Betting. However, the Act has been changed and the local government imposes additional restrictions on gambling activity.
Amendment of Polish Gambling ActPolish parliament adopted Gambling Law in December 2016. The president signed the Act on April 1, 2017. One of the vital prescriptions of Gambling law refers to unlicensed operators. According to Polish gambling law, unlicensed operators are websites that don’t hold an online gambling license. Under the local Gambling Act, all these sites are illegal. However, casino operators ignore these prescriptions…
Local regulatory bodies including the Ministry of Finance are working on the register of blacklisted operators. They plan to compile the register of unallowed operators with a focus on providers in the Polish Language. Once the site has been placed on the blacklist, internet service providers are informed about that. In the next step, providers are required to block access to these operators. If the visitors want to access the blacklisted website, they will be rerouted to the sites allowed by the Polish government.
According to amended Polish gambling law, online sites without a license can submit an appeal against the decision to be placed on a blacklist. However, the Ministry of Finance is not obliged to inform operators about putting them in the register of blacklisted providers.
Amendments of the Polish Act will have an impact on unlicensed providers of gambling services. Payment providers are not allowed to work with unapproved operators to process transactions. It means that all payment providers should comply with these prescriptions after one of their gambling clients comes to the blacklist.Online casinos are always recommended options in Poland. If you look for reputable gambling operators, visit the Dobramine – unibet skrill site for more information.
Taking a look now at consequences, we can observe several things….First of all, the maximum penalty for operators that don’t comply with local regulation is 58,000 euros.
Before the adoption of the amendment, only legal activity in Poland was sports betting. At the moment, the only state-owned organization called Totalizator Sportowy offers casino-like games. Despite this offering, poker remains the illegal type of betting.
However, some changes are also applicable to the poker game. Before the amendment, betting operators were only allowed to organize poker tournaments in brick and mortar venues. Poker tournaments are still legal in the country. After the adoption of amendments, licensed providers have the green light to organize regular poker tournaments outside gambling venues. Another form of legal poker activity is poker organized by unlicensed entities or individuals. Here there is a maximum prize applicable of 500 euros.Brick and Mortar Venues in Poland
According to the Gambling Law of 2009, there is a limited number of brick and mortar venues in Poland. Apart from venues that offer traditional gaming services, some operators include bingo saloons and sports betting.
Each Polish municipality which consists of 250,000 citizens or less is allowed to have one casino. In the case of bingo saloons, only one venue is allowed for every 100,000 people. Slot machines are also allowed in the state.
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An audit of the Polish gambling market has revealed that while the regulated gambling industry has grown rapidly following amendments to the country’s Gambling Act in 2017, it is still dwarfed by the illegal market.
The Polish Supreme Audit Office (NIK) concluded that while oversight had been stepped up significantly, additional powers should be granted to the Ministry of Finance to crack down on increasingly sophisicated tactics being used to circumvent enforcement action in the market.
The country's online betting market, comprising both legal and unlicensed activity, grew to an estimated PLN7.9bn (£1.63bn/€1.82bn/$2.02bn) for 2018, up from PLN5.0bn in 2015, according to the NIK. Over this period, amounts wagered via legal operators soared more than 600% to PLN3.88bn by 2018.
However, the illegal market still remains dominant, despite growing at a much slower rate and having seen market share decline as a result of regulated growth. The value of unlicensed online wagering increased 42% over the same period, to PLN4.01bn, accounting for 51% of the market.
This follows the introduction of amendments to the Gambling Act, which came into effect from 1 April, 2017. This extended the 12% turnover tax already imposed on land-based bookmakers online, and handed the state-owned operator Totalizator Sportowy a monopoly for online casino and promotional lotteries. While 14 operators have since secured online sportsbook licences in the market, a number of high-profile brands including Unibet, bet365 and William Hill have either withdrawn from the market or had their sites blacklisted following the implementation of the amended legislation.
While the country's gambling tax revenue has grown since the new laws came into force, rising from PLN1.64bn in 2017 to PLN1.90bn in 2018, the money generated has fallen short of government projections. NIK noted that this was likely to have resulted from delays to the roll-out of casino products by Totalizator Sportowy. The launch of slot arcades was beset by delays, with the first revenue – of PLN465,000 – generated in Q3 2018. The launch of the operator's first online gaming products, via the TotalCasino.pl and iLotto.pl domains and powered by Playtech, only occurred in December 2018, having originally been expected to launch early in Q3.
To protect Totalizator Sportowy's monopoly, extensive enforcement activity by the Polish authorities that has seen more than 63,000 illegal slot machines seized, and penalites of PLN750m levied on businesses and individuals.
The April 2017 amendments also confirmed the introduction of the country's first blacklist of unlicensed domains, from 1 July 2017. This has already grown to 7,140 domains as of 26 August, 2019. However, the NIK questioned the effectiveness of the blacklist, pointing out that telecommunications and payment providers – which are supposed to block access to the listed sites – often failed to follow orders to do so from the Ministry of Finance. The Ministry has launched enforcement action against telecommunicatons service providers on 20 occasions, and payment processors in four instances, but noted that none of these processes had yet been completed.
This, however, has been addressed with a further amendment to the Gambling Act, effective 2 January 2019, to hand the Ministry oversight for compliance with blocking orders.
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Is Gambling Legal In Poland Today
The NIK added that offshore operators still remain a problem, as the Polish authorities have no power to prosecute these companies from offering their services to consumers. Players, despite risking prosecution from gambling via illegal sites, continue to play with these operators. Furthermore, so-called 'clone domains', where operators use slightly different URLs to avoid their sites being taken offline, which the auditor said was undermining the effectivness of the blacklist.