Don't be surprised and the government will always use that excuse and it's also commonly used by countries that block online gambling sites.
My guess is actually not money laundering that is their focus but their inability to collect taxes from online gambling activities the reason behind this blocking.
Which usually happens when the government does not benefit from the activities carried out by its people, the steps taken are prohibiting, blocking and so on.
Maybe you are right that they are only using the ban as an excuse to hide the shady things that they do. They think some people are going to be happy once they ban gambling because those people are also anti with it. They think gambling is bad and it destroys lives but we aren't agreeing with that. Only the responsible gamblers will understand what is the true benefits of gambling.
Online gambling especially non crypto are regulated so they can be able to get tax from it unless if they don't want it anymore because their economy are doing well already. The move isn't about money laundering because laundering can happen on many ways, exchanges for instance but they didn't say that they banned it.
High likely it is owed to the fact that they don't have the control over those sites and so they can't tax those casinos accordingly. But if those sites are regulated under their government, I believe they won't have any problem. But these gamblers will always find a way how to gamble and find new casinos to play with. We are in the digital age where you can bypass the government's banning protocols.
Bypassing is very easy but of course those people or violators should really be that careful on not on being caught because if they do then we know on what are the consequences and price to pay once you had been
known that you are still accessing sites even though its been prohibited or being banned.Each country does have their own particular takings on different industries specially on something that they cant
get a hold or able to input tax which is always been the case on why they are really that making prohibition but in overall its not really something a big problem for those
people who do really love or wants to gamble since accessing these places arent really that hard.
Bypassing the gambling restriction is not an issue but the point is why governments need to ban gambling all the time. Is gambling the only business which is harmful for the citizens? Is everything else is fine ?
The situation of using a VPN to access gambling sites is not so simple. Some people just want to comply with the rules and regulations and do not want to take risk or violate the regulation of the country. Also, some gambling sites will not allow you to use VPN and if you got caught they can block or freeze your accounts and funds.
Tax collection should be done by governments and they should focus on how to get taxes from gamblers and not focus on how to stop gambling just because they do not know how to track the online gamblers to get taxes from them.
