The government of Italy have announced that they are set to block over 600 online gambling websites at the end of this week in an attempt to stop the fraudulent acquisition of passwords and credit card information.

The 684 web sites have been labelled illegal by the Italian government and these include every igaming operator of sports betting, poker, casino, bingo, horse betting, and games.. currently based in the remote gambling jurisdiction of Malta.

Italy’s 2006 Budget agreed to block all gambling websites that were not licensed in Italy and more so, any Italian Internet Service Providers who are found to be in breach of this new law will be heavily fined.

A large number of high ranking online gambling sites including the UK’s Betfair have a Maltese license and will therefore no longer be allowed to operate in Italy. As such, backlash is expected from these companies in the form of a legal challenge to the new Italian bans.

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 25th, 2006 at 9:02 pm and is filed under Europe Gambling, Gambling Industry News, Online Casino. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.