The Swiss Lottery and Betting Board (Comlot) has decided to add 16 more rogue domains to its blacklist.
The original blacklist was first issued back in September 2019 and had a total of 65 blacklisted domains. With the new additions, the blacklist now has 81 sites and all of them are banned from serving Swiss customers.
A number of well-known gambling domains featured on the September blacklist. The most notable one is Bet365’s main .com domain, which is surprising considering how big the online casino is in the UK market. For the October list, the Italian version of the site was added. Italian operators Betaland.it and Betflag.it were also added this month.
Further additions to the October list include Betonline.ag, SportsBetting.ag, Africabet.co.zw, Anoguess.com, Anogame.com, Betlima117.com, Bahigo207.com, Betolimp.com, Betlive.com, Betrebels.com, Lopoca.com, Betspawn.com and Topsport.com.au.
This is not the only gambling blacklist out there for Switzerland. The country’s Federal Gaming Commission (ESBK) issued another blacklist back in September. There were some sites on that list that were not found on the Comlot list. The ESBK is yet to update the blacklist this month.
Survey Shows Unlicensed Sites Not Very Popular
The ESBK released a new survey of Swiss gambling behaviour but the data is a bit dated since it was drawn from 2017. There were 18,832 respondents and 69 percent of them said they gambled at least once. This is a slight drop from 70.6 percent back in 2012.
According to the survey, the Swiss love participate in state lotteries the most which has a 48.2 percent participation rate. This is followed raffles and private games which have a 14.3 percent participation level. Casino table games come in next at 8.6 percent and the lowest draw among Swiss gamblers is internationally licensed online gambling sites which saw only a 2.3 percent participation rate.
Though international gambling sites scored low on the survey, it appears that the Swiss gamblers who frequent these sites tend to be those who have issues with problem gambling. However, it isn’t a huge concern as of now as the survey shows that only 2.8 percent of gamblers showed any signs of problem gambling and only 0.2 percent could be considered as pathological gamblers.
The ESBK is pleased that they don’t have high stats of problem gamblers in the country and claims that this low number is because the Swiss government imposes strict restrictions on gambling access.