Israeli Court Takes Aim at Online Gambling Domains
Online gaming companies are sweating bullets in Israel after three unauthorized gambling domains – p2vbet.com, 1xbet.com, and totobet777.com – were blocked from targeting Israeli customers by a court-ordered injunction.
Earlier this week, Tel AvivDistrict Court Judge Zion Kapah, at the behest of the state prosecutor’s office and the Israeli Police’s Unit for Combating Economic Crime, issued an order to local Internet service providers (ISPs) to block the domains, theoretically prohibiting players in Israel from accessing the online gambling services.
Israel's Stance on Gambling
The move comes on the heels of the Powers to Prevent Offenses Through an Internet Site Law 5767-2017, which passed last year and gave local authorities the power to issue ISP restrictions in regards to “serious crimes,” which include terrorism, child pornography, drugs, prostitution, and apparently unregulated gambling.
Ran Bar Zik: “They are ridiculous and just wasting precious public time and money."
"Within the focus of the Israel Police's effort to deal with severe economic crime in the area of gambling organization and management, the Unit for Combating Economic Crime in Lahav 433 has been working to expose sites that operate gambling in order to allow them to be closed," the Ministry of Justice wrote in a press release.
The trio of domains were the first gambling sites targeted, though they don’t figure to be the last as Haim Wismonsky, the director of the Economic Crime Unit, revealed other sites would be targeted in the future.
This isn’t the first time Israeli police have taken a hard stance against gambling. In 2017, police officers were ordered to avoid casinos, even legal ones, when traveling abroad. Meanwhile, gambling is mostly illegal in Israel – lottery and sports betting are the exceptions – while Israel-based companies are prohibited from operating online gaming platforms.
That said, 888 Holdings, Ladbrokes Coral, William Hill, and Playtech have a mix of marketing, technical support, and development subsidiaries based in Israel, so it’s a bit of a grey area.
Blocking Easier Said Than Done
As a result of the domain blockage, visitors to the sites are met with a message stating the sites are prohibited by law. However, experts say there are easy workarounds.
"DNS blocking of vendors is technically ridiculous," senior programmer Ran Bar Zik told Calcalist. “Almost every surfer in Israel has bypassed the providers' DNS and has broken the state's ability to use this block, and there are dozens of YouTube videos in Hebrew that explain how to bypass this block in thirty seconds.”
"...There are dozens of YouTube videos in Hebrew that explain how to bypass this block in thirty seconds.”
He continued: “They are ridiculous and just wasting precious public time and money. [If] they want to fight illegal sites, locate their Israeli owners and sue them, and instruct the Israeli credit card companies not to clear the companies behind these sites, and act legally against those sites in the countries where they are registered.”
Indeed, internet rights advocates believe that instead of blocking sites, the State Prosecutor’s Office should focus on stopping who they perceive to be the actual criminals operating the sites.
Israel is just the latest country to blacklist gambling domains. Poland’s blacklist is comprised of more than 2,400 domains, while Italy’s new coalition government is anti-gambling and has enacted a ban on gambling advertisements. Meanwhile, Greece and Bulgaria have blacklists of more than 400 and 100 domains respectively.
*Lead image courtesy of deviantart.net.
