Zeppelin

About Zeppelin

Jesper Kampmann Madsen, the founder of London-based tech firm Trace2Trace, is building technology to map the networks behind illegal gambling. Madsen, 35, and born in Denmark, knows what it means to be on the other side of the screen: as his decision to fight illegal gambling stems back to his own addiction, he tells iGB.

He was a teenager when he started gambling habitually. For several years, it remained entertainment. Then, when he was in his early twenties, came a large win on a foreign unlicensed gambling site: around €22,000.

“I remember gambling all of it back the same day because they couldn’t pay it out in full immediately,” he says.

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The supplier had so far stood behind Black Cube’s investigation, and previously described it as “undertaken lawfully” to understand and verify “concerns of significant regulatory and commercial importance”.

Spectrum’s report was subsequently commissioned by Evolution to refute Black Cube’s accusations. In its latest release on Wednesday, Playtech said Evolution had “publicly characterised the Spectrum Report as exonerating it”.

But Playtech has claimed that the Spectrum report, which is now publicly available, was unable “to confirm or refute” some of Black Cube’s claims, “as Evolution failed to provide Spectrum with significant information it had requested”.

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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.