The Netherlands Asks Casinos to Help Verify Cruks Registrations

The fulcrum of the Dutch Remote Gaming Act has been Cruks, its centralised register for players looking to be excluded from participating in and receiving information on games of chance.

The aim of Cruks is it allow gamblers in the Netherlands to not only create a temptation free zone online but also offline. This is because players who register on Cruks are excluded from accessing licensed Dutch online casinos and land-based casinos and gambling arcades for a minimum of 6 months.

Fly in the Ointment

The processes for Cruks have proven to be incredibly streamlined allowing at-risk players to either register for exclusion via an online form entitled DigiD or for those who prefer a more conservative approach the Gaming Authority (Ksa) made allowance for a paper submission form which can be sent via the postal service.

It even allows a 6-day objection window whereby people on the list can petition to have their names removed from Cruks. This will however only be honoured if the submission was fraudulent or made in error. As their website states “regret is not enough”, players with ‘submitters’ remorse will remain on the excluded list for the minimum 6-month duration.

It seems however that even the most rigorously tested system can fail as the Ksa recently announced that they have noted several persistent errors with the submission of player data spanning the period from October 2nd to October 22nd, 2021.

 Industry Assistance Requested

The Ksa has not let this matter slip by quietly, further proving their commitment to player safety they have made the errors public and called on licensed online casinos to assist them in verifying player information.

It seems the bulk of the errors were made while entering such data as misspelling names and surnames, the omission of special characters and not supplying the players identity number (BSN).

Such erroneous entries will have created mismatches when gambling providers checked player sign-ups against Cruks potentially resulting in at-risk individuals still being allowed to access games of chance.

Since an automated review and comparison is not possible regulated casinos are being asked to assist the Authority in manually verifying submission for that period.

 Fixing The Technology

In addition to roping local casinos into fixing the problem the Ksa has already implemented a simple coding update that will address the problem during the online submission process, and when data is manually entered using the forms received via the postal service.

The tweak made to the submission form now results in an error 404 message, the common computer warning when something goes wrong when a BSN, name and/or date of birth mismatch occurs.

This process has been working well over the past two months with the Ksa having gone live with the error 404 implementations on October 20th. To date, no additional incorrect player information has been added to Cruks without it being picked up.