Jungle Fortune

About Jungle Fortune

Skyhills is the third illegal operator targeted by Nederlandse Loterij, with prior legal action taken against Lalabet and Qbet. 

The Lalabet case, which reached a milestone in June, saw a Dutch court rule largely in favour of the lottery operator. 

It found Lalabet’s operators and directors had acted unlawfully by targeting Dutch players and ordered them to cease activities and provide detailed ownership and shareholder information.

About Jungle Fortune

Earlier this year, Turkish Interior Minister Mustafa Çiftçi called illegal betting a “scourge that corrupts society” and emphasised a move towards tougher enforcement.

According to Çiftçi, the rapid growth of digital payments and cryptocurrencies has transformed illegal betting into a major conduit for money laundering. 

“Casinos, junkets, cryptocurrencies and underground banking are the most critical parts of the money laundering infrastructure that fuels international organised crime,” he said at the time. “The global gambling market will reach $205 billion in 2030.”

What is Jungle Fortune?

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.