Romania’s ONJN adds around 800 unlicensed gambling domains to its blacklist as clone-site detection tightens enforcement

Romania’s gambling regulator, ONJN, has put around 800 more unlicensed gambling websites on its national blacklist, the biggest single enforcement round it has made so far. For PSPs and operators, the practical point is simple: Romania is moving further toward automated, domain-level blocking, and clone sites that used to bounce back under fresh URLs now have a harder time doing it.

1. ONJN said the latest batch of blocking orders adds around 800 domains to the blacklist, more than doubling the previous record of around 370 domains. The regulator also said it has now added more sites in the past year than over the previous 12.
2. According to ONJN, about 1,500 illegal sites were blacklisted from the regulator’s creation in 2013 through April 2025. Since the current mandate began last year, 1,180 domains have been added, including Polymarket, which has also been blocked in various European jurisdictions over the past year.
3. The blacklist is Romania’s official register of domains barred from offering gambling services in the country. Each entry is approved by the Supervisory Committee and published on the regulator’s website, with annexes listing the affected addresses.
4. ONJN said part of the spike comes from a new detection tool built to identify clone sites that copy the same root structure of other unlicensed sites and reappear under different domain names within days of being blocked. That matters because domain-level enforcement only works if the operator does not simply keep returning with a new address.
5. ONJN president Vlad-Cristian Soare said an enforcement gap still remains, but argued that limited resources make automated detection tools essential. He also pointed to recent legal amendments allowing ONJN to order the removal of illegal content, plus a public registry and geolocation system for gaming devices with QR codes that expose registry data when scanned.

Soare also said funding has been allocated for new monitoring tools with the Romanian Digitalisation Authority. Separately, he described the black market as a systemic problem at the European level and said that over 70 per cent of the European online gambling market comprises operators active on the black market.

One more signal worth watching: physical gaming machine approvals in Romania have plummeted after local authorities получили the power to ban venues within their jurisdictions. For companies with exposure to Romania, that is not just a licensing story; it is a reminder that the enforcement toolkit is widening across both online and land-based gambling.