The Constitution of Ukraine guarantees that the state will ensure the free development of an environment where entrepreneurial activity will develop on a competitive basis. In practice, this is not the case. Almost every more or less developed business sector in Ukraine has numerous examples of unfair competition, and the gambling market is no exception. Moreover, the source of unfair competition is not always illegal business. Sometimes, legal companies, or those that are at least trying to become legal, also resort to deception and misleading practices.
The gambling business is very specific, in particular because there is always a lot of manipulation around it. There are many aspects of gambling that unscrupulous market participants are always trying to speculate on. Illegals, through their agents of influence, accuse the legal market of all the abuses they commit themselves, from tax evasion to violation of player rights. Legislators also make their "contribution" to complicating the life of legal gambling organisers by coming up with strange initiatives that put them at a disadvantage to illegal operators.
However, as it turned out, not only illegal operators can create problems for licensed companies, but also businesses seeking to obtain appropriate gambling licences and join the pool of legal gambling organisers. One of these "brands" is Pre Match.
Last week, there were a lot of publications about this newly created company. And you don't even need to be very knowledgeable about the events in the gambling market to understand what brand PRE MATCH is trying to enter the market on the basis of associations with.
This event is actually quite an interesting, unusual and at the same time dangerous phenomenon for the legal Ukrainian gambling market. After all, illegals usually resort to imitating the symbols of legal brands and trying to attract players by copying brand identity. In the case of Pre Match, we have a company that has applied for a licence with CRGL. That is, it is a legal company that wants to attract players using the association with the Parimatch brand, which, before the revocation of licences a year and a half ago, was the most powerful bookmaker in Ukraine and one of the largest in Eastern Europe. Why is this dangerous?
1. "Normalisation" of dirty methods of competition. I know for a fact that this brand manipulates the former popularity of Parimatch and everything associated with it - famous colours, brand ox, marketing slogans, etc. All of this is the intellectual property of one legitimate brand, which another brand claiming a licence uses to achieve its own commercial goals. This is completely absurd, especially for the image of the legal gambling market. No Western investor would want to enter the market with such "rules" of competition.
2. Misleading players. The above manipulations are aimed at misleading players. "Pre Match tries to attract users by using and imitating the achievements of another brand. As a result, service users will be deceived, as they will not be able to receive the level of service they are used to when playing with Parimatch. This criminal business model is a direct violation of the principles of responsible gaming.
That is, a brand that starts its work with such shady approaches will continue to work with similar methods. This is absolutely unacceptable for the legal gambling market in terms of equal competition and should be punished by law. Players will see that the quality of the software is, to put it mildly, different from the quality provided by Parimatch, and they will realise that they have been deceived. It's definitely not a good idea to make a name for yourself in the legal gambling market in this way.
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