Are Online Casinos legal?

Legality of Online Casinos around the Globe

It’s clear from history that gambling has always had a place in society- from the Ancient Greeks all the way over to Ancient China, games of chance have been engaged in for pleasure and for a bit of extra money. Even today, with sports betting, lotteries and casinos having a presence in just about every country across the globe and the expanding world of online casinos making it possible to play your favourite casino games from anywhere in the world. But despite the fact gambling occurs in near every nation on Earth, the law surrounding it is anything but uniform.

When it comes to land casinos, it’s only recently that they’ve managed to land mainstream acceptance. For a long time you needed to head to a special town in order to be able to play, Las Vegas, Monte Carlo or the like, but recently the law has changed and a number of European countries, as well as Canada and Mexico, have opened the market and given gamblers a better selection of casinos to play in. China, however, still operates a strict policy where Macau (a small, formerly Portuguese, colony) is the only place where gambling is legal and given them something of a Monopoly. Other areas of Asia tend to have a complicated relationship with gambling which makes it hard to give a near-by alternative to China’s hard-line policy.

That’s the situation with land casinos, but what about online? Well, online, if anything, makes it more complicated as they initially operated in a totally unregulated space. While it’s fairly easy to limit land-based casinos in their operations, it can be extremely difficult to properly regulate online casinos just because of how the internet works. The best a country can generally do is to restrict someone from opening and running one based within their borders and attempt to restrict access to sites based overseas. This hasn’t stopped some countries from having an unusual distinction between land casinos and online ones, where operating a traditional brick and mortar is legal but an online casino isn’t. Though even here, you’re often unlikely to be prosecuted for playing in an online casino based in another country.

For a better breakdown of different regions of the world, we’ve got this interactive map that lets you see the general attitude depending on where you go, as well as a note on which ones are a little different (for example, there are places in the Middle East where gambling is legal!). Why not have a quick look and see how casino legality looks across the globe?

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