Two new proposals surfaced within days of each other this month, one in the Philippines, one in Belarus. Both are aiming to sharply restrict gambling advertising and neither is happening in isolation.
This is part of a real, accelerating global pattern, and increasingly, the people writing these laws aren’t just targeting casino operators. They’re targeting affiliates and influencers directly.
The Philippines’ approach is sweeping and explicitly names the influencer economy. Filed August 26 by Cebu Representative Karen Hope Garcia, House Bill 10982, the “Online Gambling Advertising Prohibition Act of 2026”, would ban gambling marketing across every channel. This includes television, radio, billboards, social media, apps.
It explicitly extends to “content creators, celebrities, vloggers and affiliate marketers,” not just the operators themselves. Violating influencers would have to surrender any payments received and face a three-to-five-year ban on gambling endorsements specifically.
The bill is grounded in the following statistic: per the Philippine Amusement and Gaming Corp., online gambling generated ₱201.12 billion in 2025, over half the country’s total gambling revenue, and more than land-based casinos generate.
Belarus takes a narrower, more specific mechanical approach by restricting the imagery itself.
The proposal, from the Ministry of Antimonopoly Regulation and Trade, would bar the use of celebrities, ordinary people, or even animals in gambling ads.
The theory is that this kind of imagery makes gambling feel relatable and low-risk. It explicitly follows Italy’s precedent. One genuinely important complicating detail. Spain actually walked back a similar ad restriction after its Supreme Court intervened, so it’s not clear that such a law would be legal.
A peer-reviewed comparative study published this year found “striking differences” in how countries regulate gambling advertising, but a clear direction toward restriction. Some jurisdictions have gone close to “no ads, period
Italy
Italy has enforced a near-total ban since 2019 under its Dignity Decree, with fines starting at €50,000. As recently as July 2026, the Court of Justice of the European Union reinforced Italy’s enforcement approach in a case specifically involving Google.
This a real, current sign the legal foundation for these bans is being tested and upheld at the highest levels, not just asserted domestically.
Belgium
Belgium’s 2023 Royal Decree created one of Europe’s broadest advertising bans, with sports sponsorship being phased out entirely. Stadium advertising ended in January 2025, full shirt and team sponsorship bans follow in January 2028, backed by a five-tier penalty regime for repeat violations.
—The prominent Betfirst logo on Antwerp and Unibet branding on Club Brugge highlight the jersey sponsorships facing a complete ban across Belgian sports.
Croatia
Croatia passed a law effective January 1, 2026 combining a blanket print ad ban, a broadcast/digital ad ban between 6am and 11pm, and a specific ban on ads linking directly to bonus promotions.
Kosovo and Albania have gone further still, with complete bans rather than near-total ones. No gambling advertising is permitted at all. Lithuania joined it recently too, with a detail worth knowing for what it reveals about the real economic cost of these bans.
The Lithuanian government reportedly budgeted €4 million specifically to help media organizations adjust to the resulting loss of gambling ad revenue, a rare, concrete acknowledgment that these restrictions have a real financial impact beyond the gambling industry itself.
Other countries have taken a narrower, more targeted approach instead of an outright ban:
The Netherlands
Gambling advertising isn’t banned outright, but who can see it is restricted. Advertising is permitted only for existing, age-verified customers aged 24 and older.
New Zealand
On May 1, 2026, the country renewed and strengthened its prohibition on unlicensed gambling advertising. The rules include new takedown powers and penalties of up to NZD 300,000 for individuals and NZD 5 million for companies.
Kenya
Effective July 2026, every gambling advertisement must receive regulatory pre-approval at least seven days before it airs.
Brazil
New 2026 requirements for fixed-odds betting advertising include mandatory operator-authorization verification and warning labels.
Several of the countries in this wave aren’t only regulating operators, they’re extending real legal responsibility to the people and platforms promoting gambling on operators’ behalf.
United Kingdom
The UK already holds affiliates and influencers to the same regulatory standard as the operators themselves. Under the Gambling Commission’s licence conditions and the CAP/BCAP advertising codes, enforced by the Advertising Standards Authority, affiliate marketing isn’t a lower-scrutiny category.
It’s treated as equivalent to the operator’s own advertising. One industry research effort, commissioned by Entain, documented 72 separate examples of unlicensed betting promotion happening specifically through influencer and tipster accounts.
Germany
Germany goes further in one specific way. It bans influencer promotion of gambling outright, including from outside the country.
Streamers, including foreign streamers, aren’t permitted to advertise gambling to German audiences, and well-known athletes are separately barred from promoting betting specifically.
Philippines
The Philippines bill, if passed, would be among the most direct examples yet. It would not just restrict influencer promotion, but requiring violators to forfeit payment and imposing a multi-year endorsement ban.
None of these laws or restrictions depend on where the advertiser or operator is physically based. It depends entirely on who the ad actually reaches
One legal analysis summarizes the core issue directly: “Enforcement becomes complicated when ads originate from countries with lenient rules but reach audiences in more restrictive [ones].”
An advertiser sitting in a country with no gambling ad restrictions at all can still be in breach of another country’s law, simply by virtue of that country’s residents seeing the ad.
This principle has already been enforced against an offshore operator in practice
In September 2025, New Zealand’s Department of Internal Affairs fined four social media influencers and an offshore operator called Spinbet a combined NZD 125,000 for gambling advertising breaches.
Spinbet wasn’t based in New Zealand; it was fined anyway, specifically for reaching New Zealand audiences.
Major ad platforms build their own compliance systems around this same logic
Meta’s global advertising policy requires advertisers to formally declare which specific jurisdiction they intend to target before running any gambling ad there, and blocks gambling ads entirely in a defined list of “unsupported markets”.
This is regardless of where the advertiser submitting the campaign is actually located.
There is one practical nuance, though it affects enforcement intensity rather than the underlying legal exposure
Broad, untargeted advertising that happens to be globally viewable is generally less likely to draw a specific country’s regulatory attention than advertising deliberately aimed at that country’s residents.
The legal exposure technically exists either way, but in practice enforcement tends to concentrate on advertisers clearly and intentionally targeting a specific restricted market.
Multiple governments cite the same underlying source. The World Health Organization’s December 2024 fact sheet, which classifies gambling disorder as a “health-harming addictive behavior” and specifically recommends prohibiting gambling advertising, promotion, and sponsorship as a harm-reduction measure.
A petition submitted to the European Parliament made the same argument, calling for an EU-wide advertising ban on the grounds that frequent exposure normalizes gambling risk for young people and other vulnerable groups.
Not every country agrees with this approach. Opponents argue that restricting licensed operators’ advertising while illegal, unlicensed sites continue advertising freely just shifts visibility toward the less accountable part of the market, one of the real tensions underlying Spain’s partial reversal.
None of this changes whether gambling itself is legal in any of these countries. What’s changing is who’s allowed to talk about it, and how.
Given how many of these laws now explicitly name affiliates, influencers, and content creators as directly regulated parties rather than treating advertising restriction as purely an operator issue, this is a trend worth tracking closely, not a one-off regulatory curiosity in two countries.
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