About this app
How to play Lava Balls
Members flagged the growing issue of illegal gambling sites’ advertising appearing across social media, an issue the sector in Netherlands has sought to tackle directly through legal action against Meta.
Speaking on behalf of the government, Van Bruggen said: “Meta, especially as one of the parties, but also Google, is really open to this conversation.”
She said the government would receive a report every six months on illegal gambling advertising across these platforms. She insisted the issue should also be dealt with at an EU level, through the Digital Services Act.
What is Lava Balls?
Notably, it has also provided insight into the evidentiary standards French courts expect operators to meet before taking corrective actions that could be subject to legal challenge.
The regulator identified six key categories of fraud frequently encountered in online gambling. These included identity fraud, payment fraud and abusive chargebacks. It also covered in-game cheating, money-dumping and sporting event manipulation
For each category, the guide explained pertinent legal provisions and recommended operational actions.
What is Lava Balls?
“You can try to stop gambling, but then you go onto foreign gambling sites and crypto casinos and they keep appearing,” Madsen says.
He began watching regulators shut down individual gambling sites, only for mirror sites, cloned domains and replacement URLs to emerge in thier place. The problem, he concluded, was not necessarily the individual website. It was the network behind it.
“Why not use the dataset I already have on gambling sites to map the most problematic ones, identify how they are connected and build a deeper picture of the networks behind them?” That thought process eventually gave birth to Trace2Trace.