Former ONJN boss reveals black market playbook

• Former ONJN president Vlad-Cristian Soare says black market gambling payments are camouflaged under labels like flowers and pizza.
• NV Casino, Vulcan Casino and Verde Casino remain accessible in Romania a year after ONJN filed criminal complaints against them.
• Soare blames a wider ecosystem, including payment processors, Google and Meta, for letting unlicensed sites persist.

Vlad-Cristian Soare spent 16 months running Romania’s National Gambling Office (ONJN) before his abrupt removal last month. In an interview with Golazo.ro published yesterday on 14 September, he laid out how black market operators move money past payment processors: payments tagged as flowers, pizza or a car wash, designed to slip past routine transaction checks.

Payments in disguise

Soare said payment processors have resisted flagging these transactions for years, insisting they cannot be sure a payment is gambling-related. He does not accept that explanation. Processors could spot the pattern with a bit more effort, he said, and the camouflage brings them business too, since disguised transactions still generate fees regardless of what they actually fund.

Vlad-Cristian Soare, former ONJN president, told Golazo.ro (translated from Romanian):

“Processors could identify these transactions with extra effort. They say it cannot be done, but I know for certain it can.”

He said Google and Meta share the blame, continuing to run adverts for blacklisted brands long after ONJN flags them. He remains confident that will not continue indefinitely, arguing that major platforms will eventually face enough pressure, reputational or regulatory, to stop hosting promotions for operators already outlawed in Romania.

Sites still online

A year ago, Soare said ONJN had criminal complaints filed against NV Casino, Vulcan Casino and Verde Casino. All three are still accessible to Romanian players today. Legally, he said, ONJN did what the law required: it identified the platforms, blacklisted them, and filed the complaints, at which point the matter passes to prosecutors and other authorities outside the regulator’s control.

What is live now, Soare argued, is not the platform ONJN blocked but a mirror site wearing the same branding, one of many clones that let a blacklisted brand keep operating under a fresh domain. He said ONJN carries some indirect responsibility here too, since catching these mirror sites needed detection tools the regulator only recently built and deployed.

Industry too quiet

Asked why the black market persists, Soare turned the question back on licensed operators. He said the industry has done too little, despite standing to gain the most from shutting down unlicensed rivals. He compared Romanian gambling unfavourably with tobacco, where manufacturers have funded anti-counterfeiting projects far more seriously over the years, treating the black market as a direct commercial threat rather than someone else’s problem.

He said the state cannot be absolved of its own duty either. But operators are sitting on financial and technical tools, he argued, that could support enforcement if they chose to deploy them, rather than waiting on ONJN to close the gap alone while criticising the regulator for moving too slowly.

New enforcement tools

Soare pointed to a legal mechanism introduced this year that lets ONJN issue removal orders directly to platforms such as Google and Meta over illegal gambling content. A detection tool for mirror sites, built with the Authority for the Digitalisation of Romania, is already functioning, he said, with a second tool for automatically flagging illegal ads due to be finished this autumn.

Self-exclusion remains unfinished business. The online version only restricts play at whichever operator a player registers with, rather than blocking access market-wide, while the offline version works but lets players undo it under GDPR consent rules. Soare wants one digital system covering both, letting players choose six months, twelve months or an indefinite block.

He said the build, done with Romania’s National Institute for Research and Development in Informatics, is technically finished and just needs testing, which could be wrapped up within 30 days of a government emergency ordinance. That ordinance has stalled, he said, delayed by a parliamentary recess and the lack of a full government able to issue it.

Chaotic inheritance

Soare, a lawyer and former University of Bucharest lecturer, ran Romania’s National Lottery from 2021 to 2022 and led FEDBET, the gambling operators’ federation, before taking the ONJN post in April 2025. He replaced Gheorghe-Gabriel Gheorghe, who resigned after a Court of Accounts audit found the regulator had missed billions of lei in unpaid taxes and had gone years without direct access to operators’ mirror servers, the same clone-site problem Soare says he has only recently solved.

By his own count, Soare’s 16 months produced more than 70 revoked licences, 11,000 inspections, 300 seized gaming devices and 10 million lei (roughly €2 million) in fines, along with the first online platform suspensions in ONJN’s history and more than 1,300 blacklisted sites, detailed in ONJN’s first-year enforcement results. He also pointed to a geolocation system for slot machines and QR codes linking each device to a public registry, plus over 40 criminal complaints filed during his tenure.

A separate Court of Accounts finding, roughly 100 million lei (about €20 million), traces to a disputed reading of a tax-rate change, made while current president Valentin-Ioan Tomescu sat in ONJN’s leadership. Soare said the discrepancy is not personally attributable to Tomescu, and that he ultimately agreed with the Court’s interpretation over ONJN’s earlier one, a rare concession given how much the finding complicated his final months in office.

He said he had already started recovering the money before he left, despite what he described as pressure suggesting the recovery order itself could be treated as an abuse of office. He called that pressure part of the cost of applying the rules consistently, rather than a reason to back down from the decision.

Political fallout

Soare said he was given no reason for his dismissal on 21 August, and that the move did not originate with the Ministry of Finance. He called it an administrative decision by Prime Minister Ilie Bolojan and said he respects it, even without an explanation, while noting that a brief conversation would have gone a long way toward closing out his tenure properly.

Soare does not think the black market can be beaten outright, noting that even Western regulators with far larger budgets have not managed it. What he believes is achievable is putting it in serious difficulty within months, a timeframe he had already staked out publicly, provided ONJN’s new leadership keeps pushing the tools he built into active use rather than letting them stall.

Asked what he wants from the new ONJN president, Soare said he hopes the institution’s projects get finished rather than shelved, and that he would be the first to applaud if they are. He does not view Tomescu as a destabilising figure for ONJN, even if others within the institution have been, adding that plenty of well-prepared staff remain who were simply left without direction under previous leadership.

On whether the industry now sees him as an enemy, Soare said he understands why his mandate might be viewed with hostility, since he applied the rules evenly rather than favourably. His own assessment, looking back, is that the institution he is handing over looks clearly different from the one he inherited, which he takes as evidence of progress regardless of how the industry currently perceives him.

Regulator under strain

Romania’s Ministry of Finance raised the tax on online gambling licences from 21 to 27 percent from 1 August, part of a push to close the country’s budget gap. Days later, Bolojan signed off on moving land-based venue licensing from ONJN to municipal councils, and cities including Sibiu, Brăila and Timișoara have since moved to restrict or ban premises outright, adding another layer of regulatory uncertainty for operators already adjusting to the tax rise.

A bribery probe unfolding still shadows the regulator too. Founding ONJN president Odeta Nestor was arrested in June over an alleged bribe to manipulate a compliance inspection, a case that also named Bucharest Mayor Ciprian Ciucu.

Furthermore, on 29 July, deputy director general Ana-Maria Badea, second-in-command at ONJN’s Directorate for Gambling Authorisation, was detained in a second bribery probe over allegations she took €2,500 in bribes, directly and through her husband, to fast-track approvals for gambling products between December 2025 and May 2026.

Her husband and two ONJN inspectors were placed under judicial control in the same case, which Soare confirmed and pledged to cooperate with at the time, even as the regulator pressed ahead with a separate consultation on tighter compliance standards. Both cases are ongoing, and none of the allegations against Nestor or Badea have resulted in a conviction.