San Juan prepares five online licenses and a regional registry
San Juan is simultaneously working on opening its digital market and on a mechanism to prevent self-exclusion from evaporating when crossing a provincial border. The Caja de Acción Social (CAS) is finalizing the regulations that will enable the tender for five online gambling licenses and is simultaneously negotiating with Mendoza and San Luis for a regional registry of self-excluded individuals.
The regulatory process is late to its own law. Juan Pablo Medina, president of the CAS, confirmed that the final stage begins almost two years after the law was enacted in December 2024. The planned scheme involves five licenses for online operators, with two goals: to curb illegal offerings and to improve control and fiscal transparency in the sector.
The problem that the regional registry aims to solve is geographical. Today, self-exclusion is processed in San Juan's Responsible Gambling area and serves to close the doors of gaming halls to those who request it, but the information does not leave the jurisdiction. Therefore, moving to another province is enough for the restriction to cease applying. The mechanism under study would make the registries of the three provinces available to the companies that manage the gaming halls, so that the control system automatically detects an active self-exclusion regardless of which of the three provinces the person presents themselves in.
Conversations are advanced, and there is a draft that would give legal form to the agreement, according to Medina. San Juan's registry had reached about 250 people, although the CAS admitted it does not have an updated figure. The intention is to extend the scope of the measure to the online channel, so that legal platforms respect the current restrictions, which would make the three Cuyo provinces the first national precedent of this kind.
The obligations for future licensees are already defined in Provincial Law 2724, which authorizes up to five permits per public tender. Operators must validate the identity of each player, verify that they are not listed in exclusion registries, safeguard the security of accounts and each transaction, and comply with both responsible gambling rules and anti-money laundering regulations. They will also be prohibited from lending money to players and will be obliged to cooperate with the State when fraud or illegal gambling needs to be detected.
The province has been building its framework against illegal offerings in parallel. It already has coordinated actions with Nic.ar, the Central Bank, the National Communications Entity, the Association of State Lotteries, and the Public Prosecutor's Office. It works with social media to report and request the blocking of sites, and has incorporated artificial intelligence tools that identify clandestine platforms and shorten the procedures for taking them down.
The detail that remains weak in the announcement is the size of the registry. A registry of about 250 people is small even for an inland province, and the CAS does not have an updated number, so the real value of the cross-referencing depends on how many people Mendoza and San Luis have registered, figures that have not been published. What is unusual in the region, however, is the order of the steps, because San Juan is designing the self-exclusion tool before an enabled online market exists where it can be applied, contrary to what happened in jurisdictions that first opened and then proceeded to build controls.
Tags: San Juan, Social Action Fund, self-exclusion, online gaming licenses