Chile may introduce criminal liability for running private iGaming operators and promoting them

Chile is looking at a move that would make both operating private iGaming businesses and promoting them a criminal matter. For high-risk payment providers, that is not just a legal footnote: it changes the risk profile for onboarding, processing, and any marketing-adjacent activity tied to the sector.

1. The proposal would target two parts of the iGaming value chain: the operators themselves and the people or entities promoting them. In practical terms, that means the legal exposure would not stop at the platform level.
2. The source does not provide details on the draft text, penalties, timing, or the legislative stage. So the only hard fact here is the direction of travel: Chile could move from regulatory friction to criminal exposure.
3. For PSPs, acquirers, and banks, that matters because promotion and payment acceptance often sit close together in the same commercial stack. When a jurisdiction starts treating both as potential offenses, compliance teams tend to look harder at merchant category, traffic sources, and counterparties.

Chile’s iGaming market is not the point here; the point is that a market can go from “difficult to process” to “legally radioactive” very quickly once criminal liability enters the picture.