Barbarian Fury

What is Barbarian Fury?

In January 2024, before locally licensed online operators were active, the Authority said it had recorded about 510,000 monthly cases of Botswanans participating in illegal online gambling.

Sunbet Botswana launched its online sports-betting platform in February 2025 and reported a 4,700% increase in sign-ups during its first month. As this was an operator-reported figure, the company did not publicly disclose the comparison baseline or absolute number of registrations.

The Authority said licensed operators accepted P150 million in wagers in March 2025, paid P135 million in winnings and generated P15 million in gross gambling revenue. It also estimated that only about 40% of Botswana’s estimated 550,000 active bettors were using licensed local operators, leaving a substantial share of demand with unregulated platforms.

What is Barbarian Fury?

“We have made progress, such as increasing the direct tax to 15% and including the activity in the Selective Tax. Those benefiting from social programmes and those who joined the Desenrola programme were also prohibited from betting.”

He also pointed to the self-exclusion mechanism adopted by the government.

“The debate about prohibition will remain open in the country for the next few years,” he said. “It will be an institutional debate between the Supreme Court, Congress and the executive branch.

How to play Barbarian Fury

“What is striking here is the level of activity that apparently failed to trigger effective intervention,” Williams says. “These were obvious indicators requiring further scrutiny, and it is difficult to understand why they did not result in more effective intervention.”

He adds that the recurring weakness is often not an absence of policies but a failure to ensure “technology, algorithms and operational processes actually work in practice”. Some of the QuinnBet issues followed a platform migration, underlining the need to retest controls whenever systems change.

As QuinnBet is also licensed in Gibraltar, Williams expects its regulator to consider the UK’s findings under the jurisdiction’s strengthened Gambling Act 2025. That would not necessarily require a second sanction, but Gibraltar must satisfy itself that any underlying weaknesses have been addressed, he says.