The Financial Monitoring Agency (FMA) has proposed introducing multiple fines and criminal liability for bloggers who advertise illegal online casinos.
According to Informburo.kz, since the start of the year law enforcement has identified 37 bloggers involved in promoting online gambling. Materials linked to 18 of them have already been sent to the relevant authorities. The total sum of administrative fines imposed amounts to 4.4 million tenge. Pre-trial investigations are underway concerning three bloggers.
The FMA stressed that the current liability measures do not match the scale of illegal earnings. As the agency noted, some bloggers systematically disregard the law and continue to place adverts for gambling websites even after being fined.
Under the current Code of Administrative Offences, advertising prohibited activities carries a fine of 60 to 400 monthly calculation indices (MCI) (from 235,000 tenge to 1.5 million tenge). However, according to experts, these amounts are incomparable to the actual incomes of popular bloggers who earn tens of millions of tenge from such advertising contracts.
The FMA's main proposals:
- introduce a separate article in the Administrative Offences Code — with a fine of 200% to 400% of the income received from advertising, plus confiscation of profits;
- establish criminal liability when income is generated on a large scale — from 1,000 MCI (3.9 million tenge) and above, and also if the advertisement caused harm to citizens, organisations or the state;
- apply enhanced penalties for particularly large incomes — over 5,000 MCI (19.6 million tenge), or in cases of serious consequences (death, suicide, and so on).
The draft also includes qualifying features: commission of the act by a group of persons, repeatedly or through abuse of official position.
The FMA has sent the prepared amendments to the Ministry of Justice for discussion within a working group. The Presidential Administration has supported the initiative. The final version of the bill is expected to be agreed upon by the end of the year.