Black market gambling trouble deepens for Romania’s regulator

• ONJN has blacklisted 800 unlicensed gambling websites following Supervisory Committee meetings held on 30 and 31 July 2026.
• The total number of illegal sites banned since Vlad-Cristian Soare became ONJN president in April 2025 now stands at around 1,180.
• Google, Meta and TikTok comply with 98% of takedown orders, but ONJN itself is under scrutiny after two senior officials were arrested on bribery charges.

Romania’s National Office for Gambling (ONJN) has blacklisted 800 unlicensed gambling websites following Supervisory Committee meetings held on 30 and 31 July 2026.

The move brings the total number of illegal sites banned since Vlad-Cristian Soare became ONJN president in April 2025 to around 1,180.

In an interview with Romanian outlet Gândul, Soare said ONJN is now pressing Google, Meta and TikTok to curb illegal gambling advertising, warning that roughly 70% of Europe’s online gambling market remains unlicensed.

A moving target

The latest wave follows the rollout of a clone-site detection tool that flags platforms sharing the same technical root as sites already banned, even as they resurface under new domains. The blacklist now includes Polymarket, the prediction market platform ONJN barred in late 2025 for taking unlicensed bets.

Soare told Gândul that operators increasingly rely on mirror sites, subdomains and alternative URLs to dodge blocks, while player-side VPN use adds another layer of evasion. Each domain switch forces ONJN to restart the identification and blocking process from scratch.

Enforcement has moved offline too. ONJN has filed more than 40 criminal complaints against unlicensed platforms in recent months, including NV Casino, Verde Casino and Vulkan Casino, and confiscated more than 300 illegal gaming devices over the past year.

A legislative proposal already endorsed by the Ministry of Internal Affairs would hand Romanian Police officers new powers to help patrol the black market, given ONJN’s limited territorial reach.

Big Tech on notice

ONJN has issued more than 200 removal orders to Google, Meta and TikTok under rules that require the platforms to respond within five hours or trigger enforcement mechanisms under the EU’s Digital Services Act, backed by telecoms regulator ANCOM. Compliance now sits at 98%, Soare said, though he called the remaining volume of illegal advertising still concerning.

Vlad-Cristian Soare, president of ONJN, told Gândul:

“At European level, an illegal market operates that represents approximately 70% of the online gambling market, the equivalent of around €91 billion a year.”

A Google Romania spokesperson confirmed to Gândul that the company had received and acted on ONJN’s request. The spokesperson said:

“At Google we have strict policies regarding gambling advertising. In Romania, we only allow these ads to run if the advertiser is registered with the National Office for Gambling (ONJN) and holds a valid licence.”

Romania is not alone in this fight. The UK Gambling Commission has reported referring over 100,000 URLs to Google, resulting in roughly 64,000 site removals and more than 770 cease-and-desist notices to operators and advertisers.

And a Reuters investigation found Meta’s own internal documents estimated the company earns close to $7 billion annually from “higher risk” fraudulent ads, a bucket that includes illegal online casinos.

A credibility test

The blacklist push lands at an awkward moment for ONJN.

Deputy director general Ana-Maria Badea was arrested in late July on bribery charges, accused of accepting payments to fast-track product approvals, the second senior figure caught up in a corruption probe this summer after former ONJN president Odeta Nestor was detained in June over an alleged €100,000 bribe.

Soare has framed the arrests as proof the regulator is cleaning house rather than a sign of dysfunction. He has also pushed through a new tiered withholding tax on player winnings, in force since 1 August 2026, as part of prime minister Ilie Bolojan’s wider deficit-cutting programme.

On the reform side, Soare told Gândul that Romania’s gambling laws need updating so ONJN can revoke licences more easily, alongside new rules on minimum gaming standards, test accounts, live streaming and advertising content.

Two IT systems, an internal digitisation platform and a GIS system for tracking slot machines and VLT terminals, are due by the second quarter of 2027, and a metadata-analysis system built with the Digitalisation Authority to flag suspicious transactions should go live by the end of 2026.

Soare told Gândul:

“The legislation will need to be amended, which is why we will propose adapting it to these new realities, so that ONJN can revoke licences more easily.”

The pressure on tech platforms lands weeks after the Court of Justice of the European Union upheld a €750,000 fine against Google over unlicensed gambling ads on YouTube in Italy, a ruling that found the company liable for content published through commercial partnerships.

Operators such as Flutter have separately called for coordinated action against the illegal sector. As ONJN tries to clean up its own house, the same question is playing out across Europe: who is actually responsible when illegal gambling ads keep running, the platforms carrying them or the regulators policing them.