New Zealand’s minister for internal affairs is demanding a rewrite of the country’s gambling laws to prevent online casinos from advertising on local television.

For the past week or so, local online magazine The Spinoff has been running alarmist pieces about Malta-licensed online casino JackpotCity advertising its dot-net free-play site on Kiwi television. The adverts were likened to a ‘Trojan horse’ intended to trick customers into visiting the real-money dot-com casino site.

The Spinoff claims JackpotCity’s true intent is evident in the fact that if you don’t remember the commercial telling you to go to the dot-net address and instead do a Google search on ‘JackpotCity,’ you’re far more likely to find the dot-com version at the top of your search results. To which we say, well, duh.

The Spinoff was forced to concede that there’s no law preventing JackpotCity from promoting its free-play site in this manner. Last October, a confused Kiwi who believed that promoting real-money online gambling on TV was agin’ the law (which it is) complained to the NZ Advertising Standards Authority about a JackpotCity ad, but the watchdog found “no grounds for the complaint to proceed.”