The VNLOK, a Dutch gambling industry association, reported that the majority of gambling advertising on Facebook and Instagram directed towards Dutch residents in May and June came from operators not possessing licenses.
The VNLOK discovered that, according to its analysis of advertising posted in Meta’s platform as well as in the advertisements themselves, around 96.5% of advertisements placed in May and about 93.7% of ads from June were linked to unlicensed operators. There was also a tendency that among ads that could be traced back to Facebook pages, the share of illegal ads was even bigger – 96% in May and nearly 98.8% in June.
VNLOK analyzed around 65,000 ads with the largest reach and noticed that illegal advertisements regularly appeared on Facebook pages which did not seem to have anything to do with gambling.
Moreover, the number of Facebook pages featuring gambling advertisements has increased from 697 to 3,237 from May to June.
VNLOK said:
The Facebook pages are emphatically not recognisable as gambling providers. They fall into more than a hundred different categories… This fragmentation makes detection at page level difficult and allows advertisers to continue under a new identity immediately after a removal.
Around 11% of illegal ads detected were removed by Meta in May, and this number reached 15% in June.
VNLOK was able to identify various methods like cloaking, rerouting advertisements through Telegram, and utilizing well known Dutch gambling brands without proper authorization. Cloaking enables businesses to show different information to government regulatory bodies and customers, making any law enforcement processes complicated.
The association has lodged a complaint to the European Commission, which is followed by actions against Meta. What they demand is stricter verification process of all gambling advertisers.
This problem comes as Netherlands has been tightening up laws concerning gambling advertisements.