Vegas Magic

What is Vegas Magic?

“There are valid arguments to be made in relation to raising the barriers to licensing, but this may come at a cost of diminishing competition and entrepreneurship,” he says.

In any event, successive regulatory tightening and tax increases have already created a “reasonably effective deterrent” to market entry.

There is a second complication. The relentless flow of Commission statements may eventually make enforcement less damaging rather than more.

About Vegas Magic

The system starts with domains that have already been identified by authorities. Trace2Trace then crawls them, looking for technical connections and similarities.

These include shared hosting, DNS clusters, source-code strings, tracking systems, logos and favicons. The system can also follow redirects and other mechanisms that may not be visible through a conventional web request.

A website might initially appear to be a normal local site, while behind it sits an iframe, JavaScript redirect or a chain of other pages leading to the actual gambling destination.

What is Vegas Magic?

Betfred currently operates approximately 1,094 retail shops across the UK. Done highlighted the concrete risks of Machine Gaming Duty – taxes on gambling machines – doubling from 20% to 40%, a move reportedly under consideration by Chancellor John Healey ahead of the Autumn Budget.

Betfred’s retail business still heavily depends on fixed-odds betting terminals (FOBTs) and in-shop gambling. Despite the maximum stake limit being cut to £2 in 2019, FOBTs account for roughly half of Betfred’s shop profits. Done emphasised that without these machines, retail betting wass “impossible”.

According to Done, such a tax rise would lead Betfred to close 495 of its shops within a year, resulting in the loss of 2,575 jobs and roughly £67 million in foregone tax revenue for the Exchequer.