Key Points
- Up to 97% of gambling ads reaching Dutch users in May and June 2026 promoted unlicensed operators, per VNLOK’s audit of Meta’s own advertising library.
- VNLOK has filed a DSA lawsuit in Dutch courts and a formal complaint to the European Commission, seeking daily financial penalties until Meta acts.
- The Netherlands’ illegal gambling market now captures 53% of total gambling spend, surpassing the regulated sector for the first time since legalisation in 2021.
VNLOK’s latest audit confirms almost nothing has changed since the June lawsuit. Illegal gambling ads continue flooding Facebook and Instagram, and the Dutch black market is now bigger than the legal one.
Months of Warnings, and the Ads Keep Coming
Two months after announcing a lawsuit against Meta, Dutch licensed operator association VNLOK published audit data on 27 August that most people in Brussels should find uncomfortable reading. Between May and June 2026, between 94% and 97% of gambling advertisements reaching Dutch users on Facebook and Instagram came from unlicensed operators, according to VNLOK’s review of Meta’s advertising library. For a platform that publicly claims to enforce strict advertising policies, those figures raise a question that gets harder to sidestep with each new report.
VNLOK did not work from a small sample. The group selected 65,000 gambling advertisements with the largest reach, classified 96.5% of May advertisements as illegal, and 93.7% of June advertisements likewise. What makes the finding harder to dismiss is where those ads were hiding. The Facebook pages carrying them fell into more than a hundred different categories, from fan pages and municipality pages to marketing agencies, entertainment websites, and personal blogs.
How Illegal Operators Stay Invisible?
That fragmentation is deliberate, not coincidental. Cloaking technology allows illegal operators to serve different landing pages to different viewers; a regulator checking an ad may see an error message, while a prospective customer sees a working illegal casino. Telegram redirects and the unauthorised use of established Dutch gambling brand names are among the other evasion methods VNLOK identified.
The churn figures sharpen the picture further. Ads stayed live for an average of 1.58 days in May and two days in June. Some 76% of May advertisements ran for less than a day before disappearing. Meta removed 11% of more than 60,000 flagged illegal ads in May and 15% in June. Removal improved slightly month on month, yet VNLOK argues that reactive enforcement lands after the damage is done, given how quickly these ads accumulate reach. The number of pages running gambling ads also jumped sharply, from 697 pages in May to 3,237 in June. Illegal operators are not slowing down; they are scaling up their workarounds.
A Lawsuit on Two Fronts
The VNLOK brought its case in June and included, among others, Entain, bet365, and MGM Resorts as members. The action is seeking a declaratory judgment against Meta that the company violated the Digital Services Act (DSA), being directly responsible for the posting of illegal gambling content, accompanied by an order for compliance with a daily fine. At the same time, the association submitted a claim to the European Commission to investigate and possibly impose penalties and enforce compliance.
The Dutch courts have already initiated actions against Meta based on the DSA violation. Specifically, in October 2025, the Amsterdam district court ruled that Facebook and Instagram were in violation of the act regarding feed settings, and the court of appeal imposed a compliance deadline, imposing fines of up to €100,000 per day from January 2026. Other courts have already initiated tests of platform responsibility with regard to gambling content. Thus, in January 2026, the Paris Court of Appeal confirmed an order to require Meta to filter out fraudulent gambling advertisements involving the Barriere casino, given the fact that Barriere had spotted at least 2,400 ads on Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger in early 2024.
VNLOK wants Meta to verify gambling advertisers targeting the Netherlands before ads run, not after complaints arrive.
The Channelisation Collapse Sitting Behind All of This
The illegal ad problem cannot be separated from what has happened to the Dutch gambling market at large. When the Netherlands legalised online gambling in 2021, channelisation, steering players toward licensed and regulated operators, was the central purpose of the framework. That objective has quietly collapsed. The KSA reported that channelisation in terms of gross gambling revenue fell from 51% in late 2024 to 49% in early 2025, with 53% of total gambling spend now flowing to unlicensed operators by the end of 2025.
Licensed companies were prohibited from engaging in social media marketing from July 2024 and in sports sponsorship from July 2025. The gambling tax was increased to 37.8% of the gross gambling income from January 2026. All unlicensed operators were violating all these regulations and were still advertising in the very media that their licensed competitors could no longer use any more. According to the KSA’s statistics, there were 30,000 gamblers playing only on illegal websites in the second half of 2025 compared to 19,000 in the first half of the year.
VNLOK’s research also found that people gambling with illegal operators are more than four times as likely to carry a high-risk problem gambling profile. Dutch law prohibits gambling ads from targeting adults aged 18 to 23, yet an academic review of 277 ads in Meta’s library found 7.3% of ads from online licensees and 29.8% from land-based licensees targeted exactly that group.
Expert Analysis: Is Dutch Policy Handing the Market to Criminals?
We think the Dutch government is caught inside a policy loop it designed itself, and the data keeps confirming it. The argument for tighter advertising restrictions was always that reducing exposure would reduce harm. What the KSA’s own reports now show is that reducing visibility for licensed operators pushed players toward an illegal market with no deposit limits, no affordability checks, and no duty-of-care obligations.
Justin Franssen, partner at Amsterdam gaming law firm Franssen Tolboom, said the goal of channelisation has been “quietly abandoned,” adding that the new policy mantra is harm prevention rather than steering players toward regulated options. When asked whether a total advertising ban would succeed where partial bans failed, his answer was direct: “There is no evidence that it will succeed.” The KSA itself has raised concerns about a total ban. The Dutch government is pressing ahead regardless.
What we find genuinely difficult to reconcile is Meta’s position in this. The same week VNLOK published its August audit, Meta agreed to pay approximately $18 billion to settle US state claims that it designed addictive platforms knowingly harmful to children. A company settling claims of that magnitude while simultaneously leaving thousands of illegal gambling ads live, including ads targeting young adults specifically protected under Dutch law, is not a company overwhelmed by a technical challenge. It is a company making a decision about which risks are worth managing.
Meta has previously stated it enforces strict advertising policies and removes ads that breach those rules once identified. VNLOK’s data from two consecutive months suggests that the removal rate sits at roughly 11% to 15%. The UK Gambling Commission’s executive director, Tim Miller, said at an industry event earlier this year: “If we can find them, then so can Meta: they simply choose not to look.”
That framing, from a regulator, not a trade lobby, is what gives the VNLOK lawsuit its weight. If Dutch courts order Meta to verify advertisers before campaigns run rather than after flags arrive, and back that order with daily penalties, the calculation for Meta changes. Until then, the illegal operators keep running, the channelisation rate keeps slipping, and the platform keeps collecting the ad revenue.
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