Romanian regulator urges Meta and Google to take action over ads for unlicensed gambling
The ONJN says it found ads for blacklisted operators across the tech giants’ platforms.
Romania.- The Romanian gambling regulator, the ONJN, has written to Meta and Google to ask them to improve monitoring of gambling advertising on their platforms. It says it found adverts for operators that are on its blacklist but were able to specifically targeting Romanian players via Meta’s Facebook, Instagram and Messenger and in Google search results.
The regulator noted that Romanian law considers enabling unlicensed gambling through content distribution, payment or IT services to be illegal and that fines of up to 100,000 lei (€20,000) can be issued to both operators and hosting platforms.
It called on the tech giants to take urgent steps to ensure swift investigations into the campaigns that it flags up, immediate suspensions of paid promotions by unlicensed operators and the disclosure of information about the accounts responsible for the content.
he Senate Legal Committee has advanced a bull that would introduce regulations for a new gambling self-exclusion system in Romania. The bill will now move to a full debate on June 10.
Proposed by the Save Romania Union (USR) Party’s Diana Stoica, the bill is classed as a consumer protection measure. It would order the creation of a new online gambling self-exclusion register on the website of the national gambling regulator, the ONJN. There would be a minimum 12-month cooling-off period for indefinite self-exclusion, and those who exclude would be referred to addiction support services.
Operators would have 24 hours to process exclusion requests and the ONJN would have to update its records within 48 hours. Meanwhile, operators would have to refund mistakenly allowed bets within 48 hours.
Operators who don’t comply could have their licences suspended for six months. Statistics on exclusion would be made public.
Meanwhile, a bill proposes a new gambling self-exclusion system in Romania. Also proposed by Stoica, it would order the creation of a new online gambling self-exclusion register on the website of the national gambling regulator, the ONJN. There would be a minimum 12-month cooling-off period for indefinite self-exclusion, and those who exclude would be referred to addiction support services.
The USR is also proposing a bill that would limit player spending to 10 per cent of declared monthly income. The proposals follow controversy around the role of the Romanian gambling regulator after a Court of Accounts (CCR) audit of the ONJN found serious irregularities in its supervision of gambling licences, including its collection of authorisation fees and gambling tax. The regulator was found to have failed to enforce a legal requirement to gain remote access to online gambling licensees’ systems, which prevented it from being able to verify transaction data.
Last month, Vlad-Cristian Soare, a former general director of the Romanian National Lottery, was named president of the regulator after Gheorghe Gabriel Gheorghe resigned ahead of the presidential election on May 18.
