Ismail Vali: amending the gambling machine can be dangerous

Yield Sec’s Founder and CEO, Ismail Vali, believes that US regulators and governments who attempt to amend the gambling machine are ‘dangerous’.

Participating in the latest episode of Martin Lycka’s Safe Bet Show, Vali emphasized that the US is heading more towards responsible gambling but warned of cautiousness regarding regulatory and government interference.

“We’re definitely heading for more and more jurisdictions who feel that they have access as regulators and governments to amending the gambling machine,” noted Vali. “Now, that’s slightly dangerous and nobody understands the gambling machine as well as the gambling industry does. 

“The illegal industry understands how they can make money from it, especially regulators and governments who maybe don’t know what they’re doing when they start instituting changes.”

Highlighting an example from Germany, which witnessed the regulated market introduce 10-second spin delays on slot machines with no prior warning or education to the customer.

From that, customers were fed misinformation via forums and social media platforms that said machines were rigged or fixed. This resulted in legal slot machine site sales “going through the floor” and its illegal counterpart’s sales “going through the roof”.

Turning back to the US and learnings the sector could take, Vali commented: “Where responsible gaming needs to come from is that there is an understanding that yes, there’s going to be responsible gaming rules for it. We as a legal industry fully embrace that and expect that to happen. 

“But there has to be coordination and dialog between government, regulator, industry and other self-help bodies and kind of the people who want to do good with the gambling ecosystem, but they don’t necessarily understand all of the dynamics that work in that place.

“So you need to understand when you start changing this dynamic, these are the impacts you can expect. This is what we see globally, and this is not one blowback piece that you do not want to happen because when you introduce something like that spin delay, it led to wholesale movement towards the black market by customers because they saw the legal market as unfair.”

Within the Safe Bet Show, both Vali and Lycka delve more into the illegal side of the gambling industry and the work Yield Sec can provide to aid in making the gambling sector a safer environment.