Curaçao’s Joint Court of Justice has held that online casinos may validly bar players from assigning financial claims against them to third parties, provided the restriction is part of terms and conditions accepted when an account is opened.
The ruling does not decide whether the clauses bind the players in the case. GSP, a Curaçao-licensed gaming services provider whose licence is used by several online casino brands, must still show which historical terms governed the accounts when they were opened in 2022.
The judgment, reported by LCB and independently covered by Curaçao Chronicle and Sigma World, arose from claims that casinos had wrongly withheld money. Five players assigned their alleged claims to Stichting Belangenbehartiging Gedupeerden Online Kansspelen, or SBGOK, while two are pursuing GSP directly. The individual amounts range from several thousand dollars to tens of thousands in US and Canadian currency.
The court found that an assignment prohibition is not inherently unreasonable. It considered such a restriction justifiable in principle because gambling operators must carry out fraud-prevention and anti-money-laundering checks. A valid clause can therefore prevent a player from transferring a claim to an organisation such as SBGOK.
The judges also held that asking an organisation to collect money for a player does not necessarily avoid the contractual restriction. The finding could constrain groups pursuing gambling-related financial claims through formal assignments from customers.
A central dispute was whether GSP could rely on casino terms presented during registration. GSP maintained that customers accessed the conditions through a link and confirmed acceptance by ticking a box before creating an account or gambling.
The court agreed that terms in electronically concluded contracts must be made available in a way that lets customers store and consult them later. But it said the absence of a separate download or save button does not automatically stop an operator relying on the terms, and that an operator need not prove each player actually opened or read them.
That approach differs from an earlier Usoftgaming case, in which the operator could not rely on its conditions because it had not sufficiently demonstrated that customers could save the relevant version. In the GSP proceedings, questions remain over Betcoin’s terms, including discrepancies between article numbers cited by GSP and documents submitted to the court.
The decision also sits within Curaçao’s broader tightening of online-gaming compliance. As covered in July, the jurisdiction has been overhauling requirements for licensed operators, including crypto-gambling businesses. In August, the Curaçao Gaming Authority, the Central Bank of Curaçao and Sint Maarten, and the Financial Intelligence Unit Curaçao introduced provisions extending customer-identification and verification requirements to remote digital onboarding.
GSP and SBGOK may each submit further documentation, including SBGOK’s proposed historical versions of the terms, by Oct. 6. The court will then continue its examination of the individual claims.
