Meta is again in the crosshairs over illegal gambling advertising, this time in Australia, where the country’s media regulator says a gap in the law leaves it unable to penalize the social media giant for serving unlicensed casino ads to local users.
A Sydney Morning Herald investigation published on August 14th documented Facebook and Instagram running ads for offshore online casinos, including poker machine apps, roulette and blackjack simulators, and sites impersonating established brands such as Crown Melbourne and Star, neither of which offers online gambling. The report found that many of the ads are placed by affiliate marketers earning ongoing commissions of up to 20 percent of a referred customer’s losses, and that some direct users to “scambling” sites engineered so that winnings can never be withdrawn.
The regulatory problem sits in the fine print of the Interactive Gambling Act 2001. As the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) explained to the Herald, before it can make an advertising breach finding it must be satisfied that the majority of people accessing a given site are physically located in Australia — a threshold that is close to impossible to meet for globally hosted platforms. In practice, that leaves ACMA able only to request that Meta voluntarily remove offending content rather than compel it.
That constraint is set to change. The Interactive Gambling Amendment (Gambling Reform) Bill 2026, introduced into federal parliament on July 2nd, would hand ACMA new powers to issue removal notices for illegal gambling advertisements on online content services, and would require internet service providers, domain name system providers, app distribution services and search engines to block access to designated illegal operators.
The bill also imposes positive obligations on banks and payment providers to block fund transfers to those services. Most provisions are scheduled to commence on January 1st, 2027, though the legislation was referred to a Senate inquiry that is due to report on August 17. Australia’s illegal-market enforcement figures give a sense of the scale ACMA is dealing with: in 2025–26 the regulator investigated 70 offshore gambling services, found breaches in all 70, and secured the blocking of 49 websites.
The Australian episode is not an isolated one. In the Netherlands, licensed-operator trade body VNLOK launched legal action against Meta in June and filed a parallel complaint with the European Commission, alleging the company has failed to stop illegal gambling ads reaching Dutch users on Facebook and Instagram.
VNLOK’s numbers are striking: it says Meta’s platforms carried more than 70,000 gambling-related ads aimed at Dutch users in the final quarter of 2025, and estimates that over 95 percent of them came from unlicensed operators. Separate research commissioned with the group estimated that illegal ads reached roughly 37.9 million Dutch users in March 2026 alone, with a majority of impressions landing on people under 24.
The Dutch case turns on the EU’s Digital Services Act, which places the burden on the largest platforms to address illegal content once it appears at scale. VNLOK is asking a court to declare Meta in breach and directly liable, and to order compliance backed by daily penalty payments, a remedy that has a recent precedent.
In a separate 2025 dispute brought by digital rights group Bits of Freedom, an Amsterdam court found that Facebook and Instagram had breached the DSA over user feed settings, with the appeal court setting penalties of up to EUR100,000 ($108,000) a day for non-compliance from January 2026.
Meta, valued at roughly $1.52 trillion, has responded to the Australian reporting by framing illegal gambling as an ecosystem-wide problem requiring coordinated action from domain registrars, hosting providers and regulators with the power to block sites at source. It said it disabled ad accounts tied to the brand-impersonation activity and noted that it removed more than 159 million scam ads globally last year. Spokespeople for Crown and Star reiterated that they do not operate online and employ specialist services to monitor for and take down spoof sites.
Critics counter that the tools already exist. Gambling Policy Hub director Lauren Levin told the Herald that Meta successfully filters comparable ads to satisfy local law in markets including Ireland and Indonesia, raising the question of why the same systems are not applied in Australia. Charles Livingstone of Monash University’s Gambling and Social Determinants Unit made a similar point, arguing that Meta’s rapid response to copyright complaints from large brands demonstrates a detection capability it has been slower to deploy against unlicensed casinos.
The common thread across all three jurisdictions is a mismatch between platform reach and regulatory grip. Australia’s answer is to lower the legal threshold for enforcement; the Netherlands is testing whether an existing EU instrument can already force the issue. Both approaches will be watched closely by regulators elsewhere weighing whether voluntary takedown requests are ever going to be enough.
