Portugal’s gambling regulator is moving away from manual checks and toward automation in its battle against unlicensed online betting sites. Turismo de Portugal, the tourism agency that houses the Serviço de Regulação e Inspeção de Jogos (SRIJ), has hired French company Sharp Vision to build a monitoring platform for the country’s illegal online gambling market.

According to the Base public procurement portal, the deal is worth €19,990 and runs for one year, with an option to extend for a further twelve months. The modest price tag contrasts with the scope of the project, which aims to change how the regulator detects and acts against black-market operators.

Sharp Vision’s chairman, Cyril Casanova, told Portuguese news agency Lusa that the central goal is to replace labour-intensive manual monitoring with a faster, data-driven process. Until now, inspectors could only keep tabs on a limited number of active sites. The new tool uses real-time data to spot illegal platforms automatically and to streamline the requests sent to telecom operators to have those sites blocked. The project is being presented as a first of its kind on the continent, with Portugal positioned as a pioneer in end-to-end, automated supervision of illegal online gambling. Sharp Vision, which specializes in gambling market regulation and already works in West Africa, South America and Europe, stresses that the system is designed to support inspectors rather than replace them. Human review remains part of the process.

The platform’s remit goes beyond finding unlicensed operators. It will also check whether internet service providers are implementing blocking orders correctly; help the SRIJ prepare administrative enforcement actions; produce consolidated data on how effective public policy is, including how well players are being steered toward licensed, legal gambling options.

If the system performs as promised, it could offer other European regulators a template for tackling offshore betting sites, which tend to reappear faster than manual teams can track them. For Sharp Vision, the Portuguese contract is also a valuable showcase in a market where regulators are under growing pressure to modernize their enforcement tools.