The South African Bookmakers Association (Saba) has waded into the fight over blocking illegal offshore gambling websites, calling for “urgent action, not further debate” — a direct response to the Internet Service Providers’ Association’s position paper last week cautioning against the National Gambling Board’s blocking plans.
South Africa’s problem, the licensed bookmakers’ lobby said in a statement on Monday, is not a lack of laws prohibiting illegal online gambling but “a lack of laws that enable effective enforcement”. The country’s current framework, it said, is best described as “prohibition without enforcement”.
The scale of the problem is enormous. According to research Saba commissioned from Yield Sec, a market research firm specialising in online gaming, illegal operators account for about 62% of all online gambling activity in South Africa, diverting more than R50-billion in gross gambling revenue offshore annually. An estimated 16 million South Africans have engaged with illegal platforms in the past year. These operators hold no local licences, contribute nothing to the fiscus and offer consumers little protection when disputes arise.
Saba said it welcomes what it described as the NGB’s recent move to appoint a service provider to block illegal online gambling websites. “We fully support the NGB’s heightened enforcement actions that include a technological component, high court forfeiture operations and the coordinated legislative push to eradicate these illicit networks,” said Saba CEO Sean Coleman, adding that action ahead of and during high-volume sporting periods such as the 2026 Fifa World Cup — currently under way — is essential to “safeguarding vulnerable citizens and protecting the integrity of the domestic economy”.
Six interventions
Like Ispa, Saba accepts that technical interventions must be supported by clear legislation, regulatory oversight and constitutional safeguards — and, like Ispa, it does not regard website blocking as a silver bullet. Where the two differ is on urgency: Saba argues the debate “should no longer centre on whether illegal offshore gambling can be addressed, but how quickly South Africa is prepared to act”.
The association has proposed six legislative interventions: amending the National Gambling Act to:
- Define offshore operators targeting South Africans and clarify the law’s extraterritorial reach;
- Amending the Electronic Communications Act to create a transparent statutory framework for blocking directives, with judicial oversight and a public register of unlawful operators;
- Making financial disruption a central enforcement mechanism, using existing Financial Intelligence Centre Act infrastructure and Reserve Bank oversight to cut off banks, payment providers and cryptocurrency exchanges from known illegal operators;
- Imposing consequences on local affiliates, marketing intermediaries and payment facilitators who knowingly enable illegal gambling;
- Disrupting the advertising ecosystem of affiliate networks, influencers and digital platforms that funnel consumers to unlawful sites; and
- Building a centralised national enforcement capability with digital monitoring and financial intelligence expertise.
Saba pointed to Australia as proof that decisive legislation works. After amendments to that country’s Interactive Gambling Act in 2017 gave the Australian Communications and Media Authority clear statutory power to act against offshore operators — including through ISP website blocking — the regulator has blocked more than 1 500 illegal gambling and affiliate websites, according to its own figures, while over 225 illegal services have withdrawn from the Australian market.
Read: Brazil’s online gambling crackdown is a lesson for South Africa
“The lesson for South Africa is not that ISP blocking alone solves the problem,” Saba said. “It is that governments can move quickly when legislation provides regulators with the necessary authority.” — © 2026 NewsCentral Media
