VNLOK says 94% to 97% of gambling ads seen by Dutch users on Meta in May and June 2026 pointed to unlicensed operators

Dutch trade association VNLOK says Facebook and Instagram users in the Netherlands kept seeing large volumes of gambling advertising tied to operators without a Dutch licence in May and June 2026. For PSPs, acquirers and operators, the point is not the ad count itself; it is that post-publication moderation on Meta appears to leave plenty of room for unlicensed traffic to reach the market first and be dealt with later.

1. VNLOK said between 94% and 97% of gambling advertisements reaching Dutch users during the two-month period were associated with operators that did not hold a Dutch gambling licence. It framed that as evidence that removing ads after publication is not enough to stop exposure to unlicensed offers.
2. The association said it based the findings on periodic reviews of Meta’s advertising repository. It has also said it is pursuing legal action involving Meta and has filed a complaint with the European Commission, while calling for stronger verification of gambling advertisers before ads aimed at Dutch consumers are allowed to run.
3. VNLOK said its review focused on Facebook pages advertising with casino-related search terms, and that it looked beyond pages that were obviously gambling businesses. Many of the pages, it said, did not look like gambling providers on the surface and were spread across more than one hundred categories, including fan pages, municipal pages, marketing agencies, entertainment websites and personal blogs.
4. The trade association said this fragmentation makes enforcement harder because an advertiser can operate through a page that gives little clue about the real business behind it. It also said advertisers can reappear under a new identity after a page or account is removed.
5. VNLOK said it identified 697 Facebook pages carrying gambling advertisements in May, rising to 3,237 in June. Among advertisements associated with identified Facebook pages, it said 96.0% in May and 98.8% in June directed users toward unlicensed operators. It also reviewed 65,000 gambling advertisements with the largest reach and classified 96.5% of those in May and 93.7% in June as illegal.

One practical takeaway for high-risk payments teams: the ad channel and the payment channel are increasingly part of the same enforcement conversation. If acquisition starts with a misleading page identity and a quick account reset after takedown, the downstream merchant stack ends up carrying the compliance burden whether it wants to or not.