Manitoba Liquor and Lotteries asks judge to ban offshore gambling site

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This article was published 05/02/2025 (225 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Manitoba Liquor and Lotteries is asking the Court of King’s Bench to bar an offshore online casino, which it says has kept “significant” sums from its coffers, from operating in the province.

Offshore gaming website Bodog and its operators, which are registered in Antigua and Barbuda, are breaking the law by offering online gambling in Manitoba, where the Crown corporation has authority over legal gaming, the notice of application filed last week in the Court of King’s Bench asserts.

MLL said it filed the application on behalf of the Canadian Lottery Coalition, which represents Crown gaming authorities in British Columbia, Saskatchewan, Quebec and the Maritimes, as well as Manitoba.

The coalition, which formed in 2022, is aimed at combating illegal online gambling in Canada. Federal law allows gambling only when managed and licensed by provincial governments.

The notice of application, which names Il Nido Ltd. and Sanctum IP Holdings Ltd., is also seeking a declaration from the court that the companies’s advertising of websites bodog.eu and bodog.net in the province as lawful, “safe” and “trusted” is false and misleading.

The application seeks either a temporary or permanent injunction ordering the companies or any affiliates or successors to cease operations in Manitoba, stop advertising, and to implement geo-blocking technology on their website to prevent anyone in Manitoba from accessing it.

At the present, anyone in Manitoba can access, register with, deposit funds and place bets on the website, MLL said in the filing. The operators also falsely advertise the site as “the most trusted site in Canada to play casino games,” the filing alleges.

The Crown corporation asserts Bodog’s activities are diverting customers in the province away from Liquor and Lotteries’s legitimate and regulated online gaming operation, which is PlayNow.com.

“As a result of Bodog’s illegal activities … significant revenue that would otherwise be generated by (MLL) has been diverted to Bodog,” the court filing reads.

Manitoba’s Crown gaming corporation did not divulge to the Free Press how much it estimates illegal gambling has affected its bottom line in recent years before deadline Wednesday.

Coalition executive director, William Hill, said Wednesday that research conducted by gaming consultant H2 Gambling Capital has estimated illegal online gaming costs Canadian public gaming corporations about $2 billion in revenue annually across the board. He emphasized that the figure is just an estimate.

He said offshore gambling diverts tax revenue from provincial governments, which have less to spend on health care and education as a result, and unregulated sites don’t have player protections.

“You have a consumer protection issue,” said Hill.

He added that many illegal gambling sites don’t financially report, allowing for potential tax evasion, fraud and money laundering.

Liquor and Lotteries said in the filing that online gambling has grown in recent years, in part because 2021 Criminal Code amendments permitted single-event sports betting — gambling on a single game rather than multiple games — and the COVID-19 pandemic, which closed casinos and led gamblers to the web.

That led the corporation to develop new rules and regulations around online gaming, including measures to prevent money laundering, the filing said.

Every dollar Bodog receives is a dollar Liquor and Lotteries didn’t, so it has spent “significant time and expense” on trying to stop the online casino from operating, the court filing said. The Crown corporation wants that money reimbursed.

The corporation said in the filing it delivers its profits to the provincial government to fund public services and is required to implement measures meant to encourage people to gamble responsibly.

The lottery coalition, the court filing says, sent cease-and-desist letters to Bodog in February and June 2023, but the operators have refused to pull the sites from Manitoba.

The notice of application is scheduled to be heard by a judge on March 5.

erik.pindera@freepress.mb.ca