By Alex Drummond, Editor-in-Chief · May 8, 2026 · Fact-checked by Maya Chen
The Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario announced on Thursday that it had served two registered suppliers with Orders of Monetary Penalty totalling C$80,000, after an investigation found their slot and casino-style games available on unregulated gambling websites accessible to players physically located in Ontario. Relax Gaming Limited and Arrise Solutions Limited were each fined C$40,000. Both companies cooperated with investigators and took prompt action to restrict access to their games on the unregulated sites once they were notified, the regulator said.
The action is procedurally narrow but strategically significant. It is the first time in 2026 that the AGCO has used its monetary-penalty power against the supply side of the market, rather than against player-facing operators or land-based licence holders. The agency named no offshore site in its statement and disclosed neither the precise dates of the investigation nor the specific game titles involved. What it did make plain was the regulatory theory: a registered supplier that allows its certified-for-Ontario games to appear on illegal websites is, in the AGCO's framing, helping to sustain the unregulated market and is exposed to penalties that scale with that conduct.
What the AGCO Said
"Ontario's regulated iGaming market is built on clear rules designed to protect players and hold companies accountable," said Dr. Karin Schnarr, the Chief Executive Officer and Registrar at the AGCO, in a statement issued through Cision Newswire. "Unregulated gaming sites operate outside that framework, meaning players have no assurance of fair games, timely withdrawals, or access to meaningful dispute resolution. When regulated games appear on unregulated sites, it risks enabling a market that exposes players to real harm."
The statement also restated, in unusually direct language, the agency's standing position on the supply chain. "The AGCO prohibits companies operating in the regulated iGaming market from offering their products to unregulated gaming websites available to Ontario players. Supplying games to such sites helps to sustain unregulated gaming operations." The agency confirmed it now monitors the market for regulated entities supplying the unregulated sector. Operators of any gaming website accessible within Ontario, the statement added, must be registered with the AGCO.
The Two Companies Involved
Relax Gaming Limited is a Maltese-headquartered B2B aggregator that supplies its own slot titles, including Money Train, Iron Bank and Hellcatraz, plus more than 4,000 third-party games sourced through its Silver Bullet partner programme, to regulated operators in dozens of jurisdictions. The company holds an AGCO registration as a supplier and its games appear on the lobbies of multiple regulated Ontario sites. Relax Gaming declined to comment in detail on the AGCO action when contacted by trade press, but the company is on record stating that it cooperated with the AGCO investigation and acted to remove access on the affected sites.
Arrise Solutions Limited is the renamed and restructured B2B arm of the operation that originally branded as Pragmatic Play. Arrise produces live-dealer studios and a substantial portfolio of slot games, and like Relax Gaming, it is a registered AGCO supplier whose games are widely available across the regulated lobbies in Ontario. The Arrise rebrand in late 2024 was intended to separate its B2B regulated supply business from the consumer-facing Pragmatic Play brand. Both companies remain in good standing as AGCO registrants.
The Channelization Number
The AGCO has, in recent statements, pegged channelization to the regulated Ontario market at approximately 83 per cent of total provincial online gaming activity. That is a high figure by international standards. By comparison, the most-cited estimates put channelization in Canadian provinces without a regulated competitive market at well below 50 per cent, and in some unregulated US states at single-digit percentages. The province has, in other words, broadly succeeded in pulling Ontario players onto licensed sites since the market opened in April 2022.
The remaining 17 per cent matters, however, both for revenue and for player protection. Unregulated sites do not contribute tax to the province, do not participate in the upcoming centralised self-exclusion programme administered by iGaming Ontario, and operate outside the AGCO's responsible-gaming standards. They also rely, in large part, on the same pool of certified-for-Ontario slot and casino games that drive traffic on the licensed sites. Suppliers are the chokepoint. Disrupt the supply, and the unregulated lobbies get visibly thinner.
The Tone Shift From Toronto
The supply-chain pivot is consistent with public statements from Ontario's senior regulators over the past twelve months. At the Canadian Gaming Summit in Toronto last spring, Ontario Attorney General Doug Downey told the audience that "the market's matured enough now that people have had an opportunity [to get licensed], and if they're not going to go through the door, it's time that they stop playing in our market." AGCO Chair Dave Forestell delivered a similar message about a more aggressive enforcement posture. Until this week, however, the public-facing enforcement actions were still largely directed at operators, including the C$54,000 penalty handed to Casino Days in mid-2025 and the C$150,000 penalty handed to PointsBet Canada in late 2023.
The Relax Gaming and Arrise penalties confirm that the supplier-level theory is no longer hypothetical. The legal hook is the AGCO's standing rule that registered participants in the regulated iGaming market may not also distribute their products into the unregulated grey market when those grey-market sites are reachable from inside Ontario. The penalty quantum, C$40,000 per company, is modest in absolute terms and likely deliberate. The AGCO is signalling intent and willingness to enforce, not making an existential statement against either supplier. Both companies remain registered.
Implications for Ontario Poker Players
The direct effect on the regulated poker lobbies in Ontario is limited. Neither Relax Gaming nor Arrise Solutions has a peer-to-peer poker product. Both companies operate in the slot and live-dealer side of the market, which means the players most likely to notice changes are casino players, not the cash-game and tournament regulars on the six regulated Ontario poker sites: GGPoker Ontario, 888poker Ontario, BetMGM Poker, PokerStars Ontario, PartyPoker Ontario and Bwin Ontario.
The indirect effect, however, is meaningful. The AGCO's willingness to fine suppliers raises the cost of supplying offshore sites and, over time, should narrow the inventory available to those operators. Players who occasionally drift to unregulated rooms in search of larger bonuses or anonymous deposits may find the lobby experience increasingly hollowed out, with mainstream slot titles disappearing first. For players already inside the regulated market, the action reinforces the underlying value proposition of the licensed environment: certified game integrity, mandatory dispute resolution, audited withdrawal pipelines and a regulator with the authority and the will to act.
The AGCO's centralised self-exclusion programme, expected in the first half of 2026, sits behind the same logic. The point is not to eliminate the unregulated market overnight. The point is to make the regulated market structurally more attractive than the alternatives. Supplier-level enforcement, alongside operator fines and consumer-facing tools, is the third leg of that strategy.
What Comes Next
The AGCO did not name the unregulated sites involved, nor did it disclose how many games or how many distinct domains were covered by the investigation. It also did not say whether further actions against other registered suppliers were under way. The Cision release framed Thursday's penalties as part of an ongoing programme to "disrupt unregulated gaming and its supply chains," which strongly implies that more cases are in train.
For Relax Gaming and Arrise Solutions, the practical step has already been taken: both companies told the regulator they had restricted Ontario access to their content on the affected unregulated sites. Whether the AGCO continues at this pace, with one or two supplier actions per quarter, or whether Thursday's penalties are the opening salvo of a larger programme, will become clearer over the next few months. What is already clear is that the regulator's enforcement reach now extends one step further up the supply chain than it has in the past.
Ontario players, for their part, can keep doing what the AGCO is asking them to do: stay on regulated sites, take advantage of the consumer-protection tools that come with them, and treat the lobbies of unregulated rooms with appropriate scepticism. The regulator's message on Thursday was, in effect, that those tools and that scepticism are working, and that the agency will continue to do its part of the job to keep the regulated lobby the better lobby.