"Gaming Association of Georgia" warns that after banning the right to play for 1 million citizens, part of the users will switch to foreign gaming systems, where if currently 120 million are flowing annually, this amount will at least triple in the future.
George Mamulaishvili, the head of the association's administration, explains on the "Analitics" program that the ban will only bring counterproductive results to both the government and the society, and it will encourage the growth of shady activities.
"Worldwide ban has not produced any results, I can remind you of our recent past, or give an example of Belarus or Ukraine, where all this was banned for years. If we move to Europe, almost everyone is legalizing gambling businesses, in the US every state is legalizing gambling businesses every month because the whole world has agreed that gambling businesses should be legal. Illegal gambling business always becomes attractive to criminals and always leads to increase in crime.
A person who wants to play, no matter what you forbid, will always find a way to play. This is harmful for the population, because there is uncontrolled involvement, today there are many ways for a person to play abroad, and I can tell you that some part of the population plays on foreign sites, and in monetary equivalent it represents 120 million GEL annually. As a result of the ban, according to our calculations, this number will increase at least 10 times," says Mamulaishvili.
On the initiative of the government, persons under 25 years of age, as well as civil servants and vulnerable citizens will be prohibited from gambling in Georgia. This group includes a total of 1 million citizens.
The Ministry of Finance has a plan to prohibit Georgian commercial banks and transfer operators from transferring funds to accounts affiliated with foreign gambling systems in order to prevent the transfer of games to foreign sites.
"Tax service providers will have the obligation not to allow payments to be made in favor of a foreign gaming business company with the tax cards issued by them, which is also a limiting mechanism in order to effectively implement the reform", - states Minister of Finance Lasha Khutsishvili.
However, there are other types of gambling systems in the Internet space, which do not deal with money, but with crypto-currency transfers, and in this direction, it is almost impossible to enforce regulation

Source: https://bm.ge/ka/article/dges-ucxour-saitebze-120-mln-gadis-tamashis-akrdzalvis-shemdeg-es-tanxa-sul-mcire-gaatmagdeba/96768