Estonia, Legislation, Markets and Companies, Technology

Currently such a list is only used for casinos.

The law supplements measures designed to protect gamblers by extending the self-exclusion list to sports betting and classical lotteries. No restrictions are imposed on scratch lotteries.

One of the authors of the law, Finance Ministry entrepreneurship and calculation policy department lawyer Taivo Põrk said that there aren’t that many lottery addicts in Estonia but it is still a very real problem.

"There are incidences where several hundred tickets are bought for one drawing or people spend several hundred thousand in a few months. This threat is there, and we found that self-identification with a document does not take much time or cause any problems," explained Põrk.

The self-exclusion list, i.e. the opportunity to register in the list of persons with restricted gambling rights is one of the most important methods of protecting players addicted to gambling. So far the list covered casinos and web pages, where all gamblers had to identify themselves. Since the list was created in 2009, over 3,000 persons have used that possibility.