Romania’s gambling regulator, ONJN, has requested Meta and Google tighten their controls over illegal gambling adverts.

After conducting an investigation, the authority came across paid advertisements promoting illegal gambling across Meta’s Facebook, Instagram and Messenger platforms, as well as being prominently featured in Google’s search engine results.

In its official communiqué, the regulator further stated that the promoted operators were all on the ONJN blacklist and were directly targeting Romanian consumers.

Under Romania’s regulatory framework, those advertising illegal gambling – offshore operators and platforms like Facebook and Google alike – are subject to financial penalties between 50,000 and 100,000 lei (£8.5k to £17k).

“We remind you that operating ‘under the counter’ constitutes a crime and that, in the same situation of violating the criminal law, those who favor this phenomenon by providing payment services, content, promotion, and related IT services are also in the same situation of violating the criminal law,” the regulator added.

Some of the actions the ONJN wants implemented from the tech giants include urgent investigation of the promotions, suspension of the sponsored campaigns, as well as additional information on the accounts running the marketing materials.

The ONJN will gladly flex its regulatory muscles at any given opportunity, as its image and competence were badly tarnished at the start of this year when an independent audit found €900m in unaccounted taxes between 2019 and 2023.

Since then, political pressure has been piling up to reform the regulatory body, mainly through calls by the Save Romania Party (USR) that wants oversight duties transferred over to Romania’s National Revenue Office.

The fallout from the February audit resulted in Gheorghe-Gabriel Gheorghe, the ONJN’s fifth President since 2018, stepping down from the post.

His role was taken up by new ONJN President Vlad-Cristian Soare, who has scrambled to address the issues inherited from the previous leadership by implementing stricter licensing oversight and working towards modernising the country’s self-exclusion registry.

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