Romania Asks Google and Meta to Block Illegal Gaming Ads

Romania is seeking to crack down on illegal gambling content appearing across Google and Meta’s platforms. To that end, the country’s regulator, Oficiul Național pentru Jocuri de Noroc (ONJN) asked the tech giants to take down any paid ads promoting unauthorized gambling operations.

ONJN Asks Google and Meta to Take Immediate Action

In formal letters sent to Meta and Google, the ONJN described the appearance of sponsored ads promoting gambling platforms that are not permitted in Romania. The ads in question were spotted across Meta’s social media platforms and in Google search results.

The ONJN emphasized that the promotion of illegal gambling is strictly prohibited in Romania and that violating these rules is associated with fines of up to $23K. The regulator therefore asked Metra and Google to immediately investigate the ads and prevent them from appearing to Romanian players.

The ONJN also asked the two tech giants to send it information about the entities responsible for the ads. It concluded that Meta and Google should make sure that no future incidents occur.

On a separate note, the ONJN highlighted that offering unlicensed gambling is a serious offense and that violators risk legal charges.

ONJN Under Fire for Insufficient Oversight, Self-Exclusion

Earlier this year, the ONJN found itself under fire following a report which found that the regulatory body has never effectively monitored online gambling in the country. Published by the Court of Accounts, the report extensively questioned the effectiveness of the ONJN’s oversight, suggesting that the body granted licenses to iGaming companies without enforcing the requirement for a monitoring terminal at the ONJN HQ.

The ONJN was furthermore accused of failing to enforce even minimal verification of financial declarations made by gambling operators. Discrepancies in authorization fees amounted to tens of millions of lei, resulting in significant losses for the state.

Not long after that, the European Gaming and Betting Association’s (EGBA) secretary general, Maarten Haijer, asked Romania to modernize its approach to safer gambling by improving its self-exclusion system. He proposed a real-time, fail-safe system that is accessible to all Romanian gamblers via a GDPR-compliant government website and suggested that every licensed gaming company should allow users to set clear minimum and maximum self-exclusion periods.

In other news, MaxBet, one of Romania’s biggest gambling operators, just found itself in hot water amid allegations that the real owner of the company is Russian-Israeli billionaire Mikhail Mirilashvili rather than the Cypriot businessman Vladimir Sadovsky listed in official documents.