Meet Yoni Mazor of GETIDA. GETIDA is a world-class industry leader in Amazon FBA Auditing and Reimbursements. Their auditing technology puts a great focus on discovering and resolving logistical and financial discrepancies in a relentless effort to reconcile every single transaction. We had the opportunity to speak with their Co-Founder, Yoni, to learn more about his passion for e-commerce, FBA discrepancies and music. Learn more about GETIDA and their game-changing solutions.
What’s your story? How did you get here?
How Casinosforusdt Explains USDT Gambling Regulations Across Canada
The intersection of cryptocurrency and online gambling has created a complex regulatory landscape that varies significantly depending on jurisdiction. In Canada, where gambling laws are divided between federal statutes and provincial authority, the emergence of Tether (USDT) as a preferred wagering currency has introduced new interpretive challenges for players, operators, and regulators alike. Casinosforusdt, a platform dedicated to analyzing USDT-based gambling environments, has developed a structured methodology for explaining how these regulations apply across different Canadian provinces and territories. Understanding their approach requires first understanding why Canadian gambling law is so fragmented, and why that fragmentation matters specifically in the context of stablecoin wagering.
The Federal and Provincial Divide in Canadian Gambling Law
Canada’s gambling framework is unusual by international standards. Under the Criminal Code of Canada, gambling is federally regulated, but provinces were granted the authority to license and conduct gaming operations within their borders through amendments made in 1969 and further clarified over subsequent decades. This means that while the federal government sets the outer boundaries of what constitutes legal gambling, provinces like Ontario, British Columbia, Alberta, and Quebec each operate their own regulatory bodies and licensing frameworks. The result is a patchwork system where a player in Toronto may face a different regulatory reality than a player in Vancouver, even though both are Canadian citizens subject to the same Criminal Code.
The Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario (AGCO) became particularly significant in April 2022, when Ontario launched its regulated iGaming market — the first province to do so in Canada. This created a legal framework where private operators could obtain licenses to offer online casino games and sports betting to Ontario residents. British Columbia operates its own platform through the British Columbia Lottery Corporation (BCLC), while other provinces such as Manitoba and Saskatchewan run their own lottery corporations with varying degrees of openness toward private operators. Quebec has historically maintained a tight monopoly through Loto-Québec. This provincial divergence is the foundational challenge that Casinosforusdt addresses when it explains USDT gambling regulations to Canadian users.
The Criminal Code itself does not specifically mention cryptocurrency. Section 207 of the Code, which governs lawful lotteries and gaming, was drafted in an era when digital currencies did not exist. This legislative silence has created significant interpretive ambiguity. Regulators have generally taken the position that the nature of the currency used to wager does not alter the legality of the underlying gambling activity — what matters is whether the operator is licensed and the activity is permitted under provincial law. However, the use of USDT introduces additional considerations around anti-money laundering (AML) compliance, know-your-customer (KYC) requirements, and the traceability of funds, all of which are governed by the Proceeds of Crime (Money Laundering) and Terrorist Financing Act (PCMLTFA), administered by the Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada (FINTRAC).
Since 2014, businesses dealing in virtual currencies in Canada have been classified as Money Services Businesses (MSBs) under FINTRAC guidelines, and since June 2020, this classification was extended and clarified to include foreign MSBs serving Canadian customers. This means that a USDT gambling platform operating from Malta or Curaçao but accepting Canadian players is technically required to register with FINTRAC, implement AML programs, and report suspicious transactions. The practical enforcement of these requirements against offshore operators remains limited, but the regulatory obligation exists — a distinction that Casinosforusdt consistently highlights in its provincial breakdowns.
How Casinosforusdt Structures Its Provincial Analysis
What distinguishes the analytical approach taken by Casinosforusdt from generic gambling guides is the granularity of its provincial treatment. Rather than offering a single Canada-wide assessment, the platform breaks down USDT gambling legality by examining three distinct questions for each province: whether the provincial regulator has issued licenses to private online operators, whether any licensing conditions address cryptocurrency deposits and withdrawals specifically, and whether the province has issued any formal guidance or enforcement action related to crypto gambling. This three-part framework allows for meaningful differentiation between provinces that might otherwise be grouped together.
Ontario presents the clearest regulatory picture. The AGCO’s iGaming Ontario framework, which went live in April 2022, requires licensed operators to comply with detailed technical standards and responsible gambling requirements. The AGCO has not issued a blanket prohibition on cryptocurrency transactions, but its standards require that all financial transactions be traceable and that operators maintain robust AML programs. In practice, this means that USDT deposits at AGCO-licensed sites are permissible only if the operator has implemented the necessary compliance infrastructure. Several licensed Ontario operators do accept USDT, though this is not universal. The AGCO has indicated in public consultations that it is monitoring cryptocurrency developments closely, suggesting that more specific guidance may be forthcoming.
British Columbia presents a different situation. The BCLC operates PlayNow.com as the province’s official online gambling platform, and it does not accept cryptocurrency deposits. Players who wish to use USDT in BC are therefore directed to offshore platforms, which operate in a legal grey area. The BCLC has not pursued enforcement actions against individual players using offshore crypto casinos, but the legal status of those operators within BC remains ambiguous. Casinosforusdt notes that based on expert review of provincial enforcement patterns, no Canadian province has prosecuted an individual player for using an unlicensed offshore gambling site, though this does not constitute a legal endorsement of the practice.
Alberta, which does not operate a dedicated online gambling platform and relies on the Alberta Gaming, Liquor and Cannabis (AGLC) commission, occupies yet another position. Alberta residents can legally access offshore gambling sites, and the AGLC has not taken formal positions against cryptocurrency gambling specifically. Quebec, by contrast, has been more aggressive in attempting to block offshore operators — the province’s attempt to implement ISP-level blocking of unlicensed gambling sites was challenged in court and ultimately struck down in 2018, but it signaled a more restrictive regulatory philosophy. The Atlantic provinces — New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, and Newfoundland and Labrador — operate through the Atlantic Lottery Corporation and have minimal specific guidance on cryptocurrency gambling.
The territories — Yukon, Northwest Territories, and Nunavut — present the sparsest regulatory frameworks of all. Gambling in these jurisdictions is governed by territorial ordinances that largely defer to the federal Criminal Code, and there is virtually no territorial-level guidance on cryptocurrency gambling. Casinosforusdt acknowledges that this regulatory vacuum does not mean anything goes; it means that the federal framework and FINTRAC obligations apply without any additional provincial layer of protection or restriction for players in these regions.
USDT-Specific Considerations Within Canadian Regulatory Frameworks
Tether (USDT) is distinct from other cryptocurrencies in ways that have direct regulatory implications. Unlike Bitcoin or Ethereum, which fluctuate in value, USDT is a stablecoin pegged to the US dollar at a 1:1 ratio. This characteristic makes it functionally similar to a fiat currency deposit from the player’s perspective, which has led some regulators to view it differently than speculative cryptocurrencies. However, from a compliance standpoint, USDT transactions on the Tron or Ethereum blockchain are still pseudonymous and require the same AML scrutiny as any other cryptocurrency transaction.
The Canadian Securities Administrators (CSA) issued guidance in 2021 indicating that certain stablecoins, depending on their structure and the rights they confer, may qualify as securities under Canadian law. Tether has not been formally classified as a security in Canada, but the CSA’s attention to the stablecoin market signals that regulatory clarity may evolve. If USDT were to be classified as a security, it would trigger an entirely different compliance framework for gambling operators accepting it, potentially requiring those operators to register with provincial securities regulators in addition to FINTRAC. This remains a prospective risk rather than a current requirement, but it is one that informed analysis — including that offered by Casinosforusdt — takes seriously.
Transaction speed and cost are also relevant to the regulatory picture in ways that are not immediately obvious. USDT on the Tron network (TRC-20) processes transactions in seconds with minimal fees, making it highly practical for gambling deposits and withdrawals. This efficiency also means that large volumes of transactions can occur rapidly, potentially complicating the monitoring obligations that licensed operators must fulfill under FINTRAC requirements. Operators licensed by the AGCO in Ontario, for example, are required to file Large Cash Transaction Reports for transactions over CAD $10,000 and Suspicious Transaction Reports for any transaction that raises AML concerns regardless of amount. Whether USDT transactions trigger these reporting obligations depends on how the operator’s compliance program characterizes cryptocurrency receipts — a question that FINTRAC has addressed in part through its 2019 regulatory amendments but has not resolved comprehensively in the context of stablecoin gambling.
The question of player protections is another area where USDT gambling in Canada raises specific concerns. Ontario’s regulated iGaming framework includes mandatory responsible gambling tools — deposit limits, self-exclusion programs, and session time limits — that licensed operators must implement. When players use USDT on unlicensed offshore platforms, they forgo these protections entirely. Casinosforusdt’s analysis consistently distinguishes between licensed operators that accept USDT (where player protections apply) and unlicensed offshore operators (where they do not), a distinction that is practically important for Canadian players making informed decisions about where to wager.
There is also the question of dispute resolution. A player who deposits USDT at an AGCO-licensed Ontario operator has recourse through the AGCO’s complaint process if a dispute arises. A player using an offshore USDT casino has no equivalent recourse under Canadian law, and the pseudonymous nature of cryptocurrency transactions can make it more difficult to establish a paper trail if funds are disputed. This is not unique to USDT — it applies to all cryptocurrency gambling on unlicensed platforms — but the practical irreversibility of blockchain transactions adds a layer of risk that is absent from traditional payment methods.
Evolving Regulatory Trends and What Canadian Players Should Understand
The Canadian regulatory environment for USDT gambling is not static. Several developments in 2023 and 2024 suggest that the landscape will continue to evolve in ways that affect both operators and players. The AGCO has been actively expanding its enforcement against unlicensed operators targeting Ontario residents, issuing cease-and-desist orders and working with payment processors to disrupt financial flows to non-compliant sites. While these efforts have focused primarily on fiat payment channels, the increasing use of cryptocurrency as a way to circumvent payment blocking has drawn regulatory attention to crypto transactions specifically.
At the federal level, FINTRAC has been increasing its examination activity of MSBs, including crypto exchanges and platforms. In 2023, FINTRAC issued several administrative monetary penalties to cryptocurrency businesses that failed to meet their AML obligations, signaling a more active enforcement posture. For USDT gambling operators serving Canadian customers, this increases the compliance risk of operating without proper FINTRAC registration and AML programs. Whether this translates into meaningful enforcement against offshore gambling operators specifically remains to be seen, but the trend is toward greater regulatory scrutiny of crypto financial flows.
The broader international context also matters. Canada is a member of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), the intergovernmental body that sets global AML standards. FATF’s guidance on virtual assets, updated in 2021 to extend the “travel rule” to cryptocurrency transactions — requiring that identifying information about senders and recipients accompany transfers above certain thresholds — has influenced Canadian regulatory thinking. As FINTRAC moves toward implementing travel rule requirements for Canadian crypto businesses, the traceability of USDT gambling transactions will increase, which may paradoxically make USDT more acceptable to regulated operators (because it becomes more auditable) while reducing its appeal to players who valued the pseudonymity of crypto transactions.
Provincial regulators outside Ontario are also watching the Ontario iGaming model closely. There has been ongoing discussion in British Columbia and Alberta about whether to open their markets to private licensed operators, and if either province does so, the question of cryptocurrency acceptance will inevitably arise in the licensing conditions. A licensed BC or Alberta iGaming market that explicitly addresses USDT would represent a significant regulatory development, creating a clearer legal framework for stablecoin gambling in those provinces for the first time.
For Canadian players navigating this environment, the practical implications are significant. Playing at an AGCO-licensed Ontario operator that accepts USDT offers the clearest legal footing, the strongest player protections, and the most predictable regulatory treatment of winnings. Playing at an offshore USDT casino, while not criminally prosecuted against individual players in practice, involves regulatory ambiguity, no provincial player protections, and potential exposure to platforms that may not meet the AML standards that Canadian law imposes on financial service providers. Understanding these distinctions — as Casinosforusdt’s provincial analysis aims to help users do — is essential for making genuinely informed decisions in a space where the regulatory ground is still shifting.
The complexity of USDT gambling regulation in Canada reflects the broader challenge of applying laws designed for traditional financial systems to instruments that operate on fundamentally different technical and economic principles. The provincial fragmentation of Canadian gambling law compounds this challenge by ensuring that no single answer applies uniformly across the country. What Casinosforusdt has contributed to this space is a framework for thinking through these questions systematically, province by province and regulation by regulation, rather than offering the false comfort of a single national answer where none exists. As regulatory clarity develops — through AGCO guidance, FINTRAC enforcement, and potential market openings in additional provinces — the analysis will need to evolve accordingly, and players would be well served by staying current with those developments rather than relying on static assessments of a dynamic regulatory environment.
GETIDA Co-Founder Max Borin and I spent nearly a decade successfully navigating the pitfalls and intricacies of the ever-changing Amazon Marketplace structure. As sellers we realized what a minefield selling on Amazon can be! When we hit challenges we created a solution and we solved the issue ourselves, and that opened up opportunities to solve these problems for others.
I was born and raised in Israel in an area close to Tel Aviv. My mother is American, but she moved to Israel for university and then she and my father found love and got married and she stayed there ever since. When I turned 22, after I finished my military service in Israel where I served in the special Navy intelligence in the Israeli Defense Forces, I moved to the United States. I went to school in America, eventually met my wife and I fell in love and got married. I almost did the same thing my mother did, but the opposite direction.
Over a decade ago, I was working for a sales and distribution company for nutrition and supplements in the New York tri-state area. That was the early dabbling that I had with e-commerce and selling products online, especially on Amazon. At this time I met a friend that was doing accounting for a furniture company. We were both very interested in the power of e-commerce and all the stuff you can put online to generate sales and make a business. We had a real passion for it. We both had our own experiences selling stuff on eBay, so we teamed up. While still working our other jobs, we started selling anything that we could get our hands on on eBay.
In 2013, we started selling on Amazon and the business grew very quickly from zero to 20 million in revenue. Then we became a part of a larger group. Together as a group, we were generating about 100 million in revenue. Our business model was based on utilizing Amazon fulfillment and logistics progress. When you sell on Amazon, logistically speaking you have two options. The first option is that you have your own warehouse, and then you store the goods and the inventory and then as the orders come in from the marketplace, you pick and pack the unit, then ship it out and you do your own fulfillment. That’s one option and we did that: we always had our own warehouse, but it was not big. It was pretty modest to a degree.
Then, the second option is what they call FBA, Fulfilled by Amazon, where you can send your inventory in bulk to Amazon’s fulfillment centers, and they pick and pack and fulfill the orders as they come in from the marketplace and you can do it at scale on a global level. Once we tapped into that program, we were really able to leverage Amazon’s skill and instead of us having a $100 million facility or a $50 million facility, we just used Amazon’s multibillion dollar global presence facilities, as well as their software and automation.
What problem are you trying to solve?
When companies send inventory to Amazon’s fulfillment centers, what happens is some of that inventory gets lost, damaged, destroyed, or disappears and businesses are often overcharged with fees. On an annual basis these discrepancies, what we call FBA discrepancies, can equate anywhere between 1% all the way up to 3% of revenue. So when we were doing about a million a year, we had to recover and audit and reconcile and recover 1% to 2%.
Amazon has a protocol for this. Once you find this discrepancy, you open a case with them, you present all the information and then they activate their insurance policy and they provide you with the reimbursement or refund for all these issues. If you’re doing one million a year, that’s about $30,000 a year. We were part of a larger group doing $100 million a year. It was one to two million a year that we had to constantly audit, reconcile and recover for all these discrepancies
We had so much data to process that we were not able to use spreadsheets and excel anymore because the spreadsheets were breaking due to so much data and so much input. That pushed us to create two things. The first thing was to create a technology and a software to audit all this massive amount of data constantly in scale. The second thing was to create a dedicated team to keep tackling and solving the issue. So in other words, we created the solution for ourselves. So once we did that, and we told our friends from the industry that we had these capabilities, they all asked if they could pay us to help them.
When you went out for initial funding, how many pitches did you have to give?
We had bootstrapped and funded the whole ride when someone came in as investment CEO. We mostly wanted him for the CEO position for the leadership, but he wanted to have a bigger stake. So we sold some of our shares.
Since he came in, things really kicked into an even faster gear, even though we were already pretty robust. We did eventually partner with a private equity group. That changed the dynamic and what happened was every week, we were being courted by all these VCs and private equities and banks.
It’s definitely not the traditional route. We’ve been profitable since day one, and once again, for us it was more about partnering with the right organization to help us become more world class and help us expand internationally, to become really a true multinational organization, because we have a global mission. Amazon sellers are based all over the world. You know, there are sellers that sell on Amazon US but we have also sold on Amazon Canada, Mexico, UK, European Union – we cover all these marketplaces.
We had all these investors call us and reach out. We had a lot of meetings, and eventually we felt that we found a very strategic partner that would align to our ethos or our mission statement, and provide us with the right type of structure and platform to really expand beyond our wildest dreams.
What keeps you up at night?
My kids. I have a young baby and four kids total.
Would you consider yourself a risk taker?
Yes, but calculated risk. I used to be Navy intelligence back in the day. So it’s about collecting as much data and information as you can, because that’s what you do when you’re part of an army. There are risks around you and you have to be able to evaluate them and take actions that are never guaranteed, but the more data you have the better you can make an educated decision. And you take a leap of faith.
This also applies in business. You take all these calculated risks, and you take a leap of faith. You say, “I’m going to invest my time and energy here and not there”, because I believe if I do, then I get the maximum impact and results based on the vision and the strategy that we have aligned. You have to have faith in every person you hire. We have over 200 employees. In a way you kind of take a risk because you can’t always choose candidates, right? So why are you taking a leap of faith and a risk on this human element and not the other? So it’s so many degrees and levels of risk taking from things that look so random or regular to things that are really impactful for many people’s lives. Today, I can say that the game is bigger than me.
What is something that fits into the “If I knew then what I know now” category?
I carry a lot of faith in what I do, and I always look on the bright side, on the positive side. The glass that is half full. Failures and challenges will strike – it would have been great to know back then that it’s all for the best.
Challenges happen and you get nervous, you get upset about all these things. So over time, I try to learn from that and borrow from those lessons and tone it down and be more composed. I think that’s wisdom. It comes with age. If I knew back then that eventually it’s going to turn out okay it would have been helpful.
When things are challenging, don’t overreact. Don’t go into despair or over worry about things. You will succeed and get all these beautiful milestones. Celebrate them, enjoy them. But don’t think you’re at the top of the world. Don’t get carried away – stay balanced.
What are your passions and interests outside of work?
Definitely music. If it wasn’t for music, I would not be able to survive, so any chance I get I try to make sure there’s some sort of a song or music playing. I played in the band back in high school, so I know how to play piano. I know how to play guitar and the drums. So yeah, just the creativity of it. The vibes of it. It helps me a lot. I definitely like to read books. Stay in touch with my friends, celebrate life with them. I definitely like to do things outside of work.
What do you think is a misconception about being a founder?
It’s not, at least for myself, a road full of roses, there are a lot of thorns. I always say, in a way, I went through hell and back numerous times. And I found entrepreneurs really have to realize that, to a degree, they have to be humans that are very comfortable being uncomfortable all the time.
