Hungry Shark

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Three months later, Judge Denise Cote ordered Papaya to pay Skillz $719 million in damages for poaching players from its skill gaming platform on the belief that Papaya had more players and therefore facilitated considerably faster peer-to-peer pairing times.

Papaya, headquartered in Israel, quickly secured a temporary stay of proceedings from the Tel Aviv District Court and filed a Chapter 15 petition with Delaware’s U.S. Bankruptcy Court. The Chapter 15 petition seeks to prevent Skillz from initiating collection efforts until its appeals play out.

Papaya concedes that it cannot immediately pay the $719 million judgment, arguing that allowing the company to pay the penalty over multiple years would “preserve … the rights of all parties.”

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Dutch MPs have raised similar concerns before. In December 2025, CDA MP Straatman asked the state secretary whether websites advertising as “Beste casino’s zonder Cruks” should be taken offline immediately. 

In a written response published in January 2026, Arno Rutte, the state secretary at the time acknowledged that enforcement against such sites remained limited, particularly for domains not registered under the .nl extension.

According to KVA, KT van Bruggen, the current state secretary for Justice and Security, has pointed out the urgency of implementing effective countermeasures to limit access to such illegal platforms.

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The decision is not yet legally binding, with a further opportunity to appeal the denial of ‘leave to appeal’ open to the applicants. This will be reviewed by the Federal Administrative Court of Leipzig.

In his original complaint, Braun also cited a study that found that nearly half of respondents were thinking of using illegal gambling services due to legal restrictions. 

In recent weeks, German authorities conducted a crackdown on an alleged illegal online gambling operation suspected of facilitating wagers totalling approximately €5.86 billion over a 30-month period.