Dear Santa

What is Dear Santa?

The remote gaming duty hike from 21% to 40% in April is also expected to have a significant impact on the black market, with Regulus estimating it could drive the market to be worth up to €1 billion, as consumers choose illegal offerings to access unrestricted bonuses.

Other studies have made similar estimations. In June last year two thirds of bettors surveyed by YouGov said the tax increase, which will also hit online sports betting from next year, would drive them to play with unlicensed operators.

The UK has historically maintained a high channelisation rate due to it being particuarly mature with a huge competitive offering. According to the report, up to 1,491 licensed sites provides sufficient choice for engaged players.

About Dear Santa

Bally’s shares plunged 26% on 17 August despite a solid Q2 in which group revenue rose by 20% year-on-year to €792.2 million.

The share price came under pressure following debt disclosures in Bally’s Q2 10-Q filing, which was submitted to the Securities and Exchange Commission on 14 August.

In the filing, Bally’s noted that based on current forecasts, the business “does not project that it would satisfy the liquidity maintenance requirement” or the “consolidated net leverage ratio covenant” in its revolving credit facility over the next year.

How to play Dear Santa

“We receive around 7,000 domains a day on average through the lists we monitor, including new and cloned sites,” he explains.

The system starts with domains that have already been identified by authorities. Trace2Trace then crawls them, looking for technical connections and similarities.

These include shared hosting, DNS clusters, source-code strings, tracking systems, logos and favicons. The system can also follow redirects and other mechanisms that may not be visible through a conventional web request.