The Australian Open has served as yet another example of the market advantage offshore operators have over their licensed counterparts.
Aussie news outlet the Financial Review has clocked a number of gambling websites not licensed in Australia giving out enticing offers to players for placing bets on the ongoing tennis tournament.
Among the perpetrators was a website called N1 Bet, which, according to the Review, was offering punters up to 100% in deposit bonuses on Australian Open bets – with the only caveat being that deposit bonuses are completely illegal in Australia.
As it turns out, N1 Bet is the property of Dama NV, which in turn is a company headquartered in, surprise, Curaçao. Even less surprising is that Dama NV is a long-time returning character on the Australian regulatory warnings list.
Now, it’s not a stretch to suggest that the likes of Curaçao, Anjouan, and the rest of the island jurisdictions – which, besides issuing gambling licenses, may still be home to uncontacted tribes – are not the most confidence-inducing when it comes to upholding top-tier global gambling standards.
However, there is still hope for Curaçao to prove the opposite not just thanks to a healthy dose of forgetting all recent troubles that domestic companies have caused across the world, but also due to a new gambling framework that aims to put the island country’s gambling market in order.
The most significant change in the regime is replacing the old regulator with the shiny new Curaçao Gaming Authority (CGA), which vowed to rule the centralised licensing system with a strict but fair hand – dialling up the scrutiny and following up with fair punishments for those daring to veer away from the path of credibility.
Dama NV is the perfect opportunity for the CGA to show some backbone, namely because N1 Bet is apparently watching the Australian Open long after Dama NV’s Curaçao license expired on 24 December – as evidenced by the CGA’s licence registry.
What happens next with Dama NV could be a good reference point as to what to expect from the Curaçao gambling market in 2026 and beyond.
