Corrientes estimates over 3,000 illegal online casinos in Argentina
More than 3,000 illegal online casinos operate in Argentina, according to estimates from the Correntina Lottery Institute. Its intervenor, Javier Bee Sellares, warned that these platforms are deployed across hundreds of domains, a dispersion that makes any detection and blocking task slow and costly.
The number emerged from an interview with Radio La Red Corrientes, in which the official focused on who is on the other side of the screen. The statistics managed by the agency show that a significant portion of minors who gamble start doing so around 13 years of age, and that the phone has become the main access route.
The comparison with the past is simple. Before, to gamble, a minor had to cross the door of a casino or go to an agency, and there was someone capable of stopping them. Today, a cell phone and an unlicensed platform are enough.
Given this scenario, Lotería Correntina is working with the provincial Ministry of Education on a prevention program that is now in its second year. It includes workshops and talks in classrooms, plus content circulating through the digital channels already used by the provincial education system, with a message calibrated to reach children and also those around them: teachers, guardians, and families. Bee Sellares gave a positive assessment of the first stage because, in his opinion, it helped to introduce the topic into social conversation.
Awareness alone, he clarified, is not enough. The official called for striking at the financial infrastructure of the clandestine circuit and emphasized virtual wallets and any other channel that allows funds to be deposited or withdrawn. He also pointed to social media as the main ground for user acquisition and called for better coordination among state agencies to complicate the operation of these platforms.
His underlying diagnosis is that the expansion of online gambling after the pandemic outpaced the state's capacity for response and control. Hence, he calls for a national regulation that orders the prosecution of the clandestine market without infringing on the powers that each province retains over the matter.
Operationally, the agency has a department that receives reports of illegal gambling and is developing artificial intelligence tools to track unauthorized sites and the virtual cashiers that support them on the web more quickly. Activities in schools, he confirmed, continue in both in-person and virtual formats.
Gambling in Argentina is regulated by jurisdiction: each province and the City of Buenos Aires defines its own regime and its own control body, without a national law to unify criteria, and this fragmentation explains the request for a federal regulation to prosecute unlicensed operators. The Correntina Lottery Institute manages gambling in Corrientes and has been developing awareness campaigns about illegal betting aimed at adolescents.
Tags: Corrientes Lottery Institute, Javier Bee Sellares, Illegal online casinos, Problem gambling prevention in minors