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Dutch study finds illegal gambling ads reached 38M Meta users
A study conducted by XY Legal Solutions and Licensed Dutch Online Gambling Providers (VNLOK) has revealed that 38 million Dutch users were exposed to illegal gambling ads on Instagram and Facebook in March 2026 alone.
Published on May 27, 2026, the report showed that 15,114 gambling advertisements from unlicensed operators were circulated on social media platforms, generating more than 75 million impressions from Dutch players. Terms such as “free spins”, “slot machine”, “welcome bonus”, and “Holland Casino” were identified in the illegal ads, after which 1,292 URLs led users to multiple websites.
The report also suggests that the unlicensed operators used fake testimonials about big wins to lure people into their platforms and mostly conducted short campaigns lasting 3 days, after which the ads disappeared before Meta’s review mechanics could target them.
The report states:
“A substantial portion of the identified advertisements is marked by Meta at the time of analysis as ‘taken down’, ‘ad account disabled’, or ‘page disabled’. This points to short-lived pages that appear to have been specifically set up for short-term advertising activity. Additionally, the dataset contains instances where the same page name appears under different page IDs, which may be an indication of a page being recreated after deletion.”
Additionally, the research estimated that people aged from 18 to 24 accounted for 5.8 million of the March impressions, while 65.4% of the ads targeted users under 24. According to the data, with a realistic CPM of €11, illegal ads generated €834,008 in revenue for Meta.
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