Illegal iGaming in Chile cost the budget an estimated $92 million in 2025
Chile’s Centro de Estudios Públicos (CEP) has put a number on a problem the industry already knew was growing: offshore operators in the country may have generated around 431.5 billion Chilean pesos in GGR during 2025 — roughly $460 million, all of it moving completely outside government oversight.
Market assessment
The regulated market, by comparison, brought in 787.3 billion pesos in GGR (about $840 million), of which the treasury collected 148.7 billion pesos (roughly $159 million) in gambling taxes.
Apply that same 20 percent rate to the offshore segment and Chile is missing out on close to 86.3 billion pesos — nearly $92 million that simply never reaches the budget. Put another way, close to a third of the country’s gambling market operates in a parallel, untaxed reality.
Context
The deeper issue here isn’t the missing revenue — it’s that Chile’s gambling laws were written for a version of the industry that no longer exists. When the rules were drafted, a casino meant a building with an address: a racetrack, a lottery counter, a hall with tables you could walk into.
Online operators don’t work that way. A server can sit in one country, a license in another, and a player logs in from a phone in Santiago, with no single piece of Chilean law cleanly covering that transaction.
CEP points out that the gap doesn’t just cost tax revenue — it weakens oversight of the industry, leaves consumer protection thinner than it should be, and pushes issues like money laundering and sports betting integrity further out of regulators’ reach.
It’s not really about the $92 million Chile is missing — it’s that close to a third of the market isn’t obligated to follow Chilean rules at all, because those rules were written for a world where casinos still had a door and an address.
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