Dutch trade association VNLOK says Meta is still letting illegal gambling ads reach users in the Netherlands

VNLOK says Facebook and Instagram in the Netherlands remain a channel for illegal gambling ads, with 94% to 97% of gambling advertisements reaching Dutch users in May and June 2026 coming from unlicensed operators. For PSPs and operators watching ad compliance, the useful bit is not the headline number alone; it is how easily these campaigns keep resurfacing under new pages, new categories, and new identities.

1. VNLOK based its report on the analysis of 65,000 gambling advertisements. It said 96.5% of the ads in May were illegal, while the June figure was 93.7%. Among ads linked to identified Facebook pages, 96% were associated with illegal operators in May, rising to 98.8% in June.
2. The number of Facebook pages carrying gambling ads also jumped, from 697 in May to 3,237 in June. VNLOK said the pages were often not recognisable as gambling providers and covered more than a hundred different categories, including fan pages, municipality pages, marketing agencies, entertainment websites and personal blogs.
3. That fragmentation matters because it makes page-level detection harder and gives advertisers room to reappear under a fresh identity after removal. In practice, the ads do not need to stay up long to do the job: VNLOK said they remained online for an average of 1.58 days in May and two days in June, with around 76% of ads in May running for less than 24 hours, compared with 65% in June.
4. Meta’s removal rate, at least on VNLOK’s numbers, was limited. The group said Meta removed 11% of the more than 60,000 illegal advertisements it identified in May, with the removal rate increasing to 15% in June.
5. VNLOK says advertisers used cloaking, redirects to Telegram and the unauthorized use of established Dutch gambling brands to get around moderation. Cloaking, in this context, means showing one landing page to a regulator and a different one to a potential customer — for example, an error message on one side and an illegal casino application on the other.

VNLOK has already taken the dispute beyond complaints. Earlier this summer, it started legal proceedings against Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, and filed a complaint with the European Commission. It is also asking Meta to verify gambling advertisers targeting the Netherlands before their ads are allowed to run.

The age-targeting angle is its own compliance issue. Dutch law bans gambling ads from specifically targeting young adults aged 18 to 23, even though people in that age group are legally allowed to gamble in the Netherlands. An academic review of 277 ads in Meta’s library found violations among both online and land-based licensees: 7.3% of ads from online licensees targeted this group, compared with 29.8% from land-based licensees.