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Regulation
Jul 23, 2026 · 2 min read

Illegal iGaming in Chile cost the budget an estimated $92 million in 2025

Affmarketingworld
Patric Mirgeschiss
Editor, Affmarketingworld
Illegal offshore iGaming revenue in Chile, CEP study 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.

Patric Mirgeschiss
Reviewed by
Patric Mirgeschiss
Editor · Affmarketingworld
Published Jul 23, 2026
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