Image credit: Illustrative cover art. Not a depiction of any website or operator.
The Kansspelautoriteit (KSA) has had 26 cloned gambling websites taken offline, most of them copies of sites run by licensed Dutch operators. The regulator published the update on 7 October 2026.
The clones used the .co.nl extension in place of the licensed operator's .nl address. Visitors were sent from the fake site to an illegal gambling site. The KSA says the .co.nl extension is designed for Dutch business websites and is run by an independent operator, which it names as CO.NL.
After the KSA alerted CO.NL, the sites were offline within 48 hours. CO.NL cooperated with the removals, according to the regulator.
The KSA's wider investigation of .co.nl domains found other illegal gambling sites. So far, 86 websites under the extension have been reported and removed.
For bettors: check that the address matches the operator's licensed .nl domain before you deposit. A near-copy of a familiar brand with a different extension is the warning sign the KSA describes.
For operators: the KSA's findings show that licensed brands are being copied on lookalike domains. Monitoring for those domains is a step the regulator's account of this case points to, though the KSA's notice does not set a rule for it.
Source: KSA news release, 7 October 2026 (translated from Dutch).