Dutch trade association VNLOK says Facebook and Instagram users in the Netherlands continue to face illegal gambling advertisements at an alarming and unacceptable scale.
In a notice published on 27 August 2026, VNLOK reported that between 94% and 97% of gambling advertisements reaching Dutch users came from unlicensed operators during May and June.
The findings were based on periodic reviews of Meta’s advertising library, examining pages that appeared through casino-related search terms across the platform.
VNLOK announced a lawsuit against Meta in June and has now also filed a formal complaint with the European Commission over the ongoing issue.
The organisation said: “The Facebook pages are emphatically not recognisable as gambling providers. They fall into more than a hundred different categories: from fan pages, municipality pages and marketing agencies to entertainment websites and personal blogs.”
The group added: “This fragmentation makes detection at page level difficult and allows advertisers to continue under a new identity immediately after a removal.”
From a sample of 65,000 gambling advertisements with the largest reach, VNLOK classified 96.5% of May advertisements as illegal, with 93.7% of June advertisements falling into the same category.
The number of Facebook pages carrying gambling advertisements grew sharply, rising from 697 in May to 3,237 in June across the reviewed period.
Advertisements also disappeared quickly, staying online for an average of just 1.58 days in May and two days in June, giving platforms little window to act before significant reach was achieved.
Some 76% of May advertisements ran for under a day, while the figure was 65% in June, suggesting operators deliberately cycle ads to avoid detection and removal.
Meta removed just 11% of more than 60,000 illegal advertisements identified in May, and only 15% in June, figures VNLOK acknowledged represented some improvement but still fell far short.
VNLOK argued that after-the-fact enforcement consistently arrives too late, after much of an advertisement’s intended reach among Dutch consumers has already been achieved.
Illegal operators employed sophisticated techniques including cloaking, Telegram redirects, and the unauthorised use of established Dutch gambling brands to defeat platform moderation systems.
Cloaking allowed illegal advertisers to display different landing pages to different users, meaning regulators might see an error page while prospective customers were directed to an illegal casino application.
VNLOK wants Meta to verify gambling advertisers targeting the Netherlands before any advertisements are permitted to go live on the platform.
In January, the Paris Court of Appeal upheld an order requiring Meta to filter certain fraudulent gambling advertisements using the Barriere casino brand, with Barriere having identified at least 2,400 advertisements across Facebook, Instagram and Messenger in early 2024.
Dutch law prohibits gambling advertisements from targeting young adults aged 18 to 23, and an academic review of 277 advertisements found breaches among both online and land-based licensees.
That review found 7.3% of advertisements from online licensees targeted that protected age group, while the figure for land-based licensees stood at a significantly higher 29.8%.
VNLOK also highlighted that people gambling with illegal operators were more than four times as likely to carry a high-risk problem gambling profile compared to those using licensed sites.
The complaints against Meta arrive just days after the company agreed to an $18bn settlement with US states and territories resolving claims that Facebook and Instagram caused harm to children.
