Paf Says It Has Agreed a Swiss Pilot With Meta to Screen Out Unlicensed Gambling Ads

The Åland operator behind mycasino.ch will give Meta licence documents and website addresses so Facebook and Instagram can tell Swiss licensees from offshore operators and their affiliates. Meta has said nothing publicly, and the pilot comes a week after Dutch operators took the platform to court.

• Paf, the operator owned by the Government of Åland, says it has reached an agreement with Meta on a pilot to stop unlicensed gambling companies reaching players in Switzerland through Facebook and Instagram
• Paf will share licence documents and URLs covering both operators and affiliates, so that Meta can see which are licensed, with the stated aim of building a model that can be scaled to other markets
• Paf is the technology partner of mycasino.ch, run by Grand Casino Luzern, which took CHF 95.4 million in online gross gaming revenue in 2025, about 30% of the Swiss online casino market, according to Federal Gaming Board figures
• Meta has not commented publicly on the pilot, and neither side has published its terms, timetable or how success will be measured
• The announcement follows VNLOK's court summons against Meta in the Netherlands, which asks for the licence checks before ads run that Paf is now offering to help with voluntarily

An Operator Chooses to Work With Meta Rather Than Sue It

Paf announced on 5 October that it has "reached an agreement with Meta on a pilot project aimed at stopping unlicensed gaming companies", adding that "the work starts shortly" and that the goal is "to build a model in Switzerland that can then be scaled up to more markets". Under the pilot, Paf will share licence documents and URLs with Meta "so that the platform gets a clearer picture of which operators are licensed and which are not", covering operators and affiliates, according to the company's release.

Jesper Eliasson, Paf's chief business development officer, first disclosed the plan on 30 September during a panel on Scandinavian regulation at SBC Summit in Lisbon. He told iGaming Business afterwards that the agreement was "absolutely fresh. We decided it today", after a meeting with Facebook representatives that he attended with Wolfgang Bliem, chief executive of Grand Casino Luzern. He declined to name the Meta staff involved, and said Paf was investing "nothing. Only time and talks" and wanted to bring the Swiss regulator into the discussions. No statement from Meta about the pilot was found at the time of writing, so its scope rests on Paf's account.

The problem Paf describes is identification. Unlicensed operators "work systematically to get around the social media platforms' controls", the release says, and "the European patchwork of licenses makes it difficult to establish who is actually behind an advertisement". Eliasson said he did not know whether the pilot would succeed, but that "Meta does not want illegal operators on its platform".

Paf also used the release to ask regulators for more: cease and desist letters to operators and affiliates, structured cooperation across markets, including with US authorities, and powers to freeze the assets of operators that deliberately target a regulated market.

A Closed Market With a Short List of Licensees

Switzerland's Gambling Act, in force since 2019, allows online casino games only as an extension of a land-based casino concession, while lotteries and sports betting are run by the cantonal monopolies Swisslos and Loterie Romande. At the end of 2025, 20 casinos operated in Switzerland and nine of them also ran an online casino, according to the Federal Gaming Board (ESBK) annual report published in June. Online gross gaming revenue rose 1.18% in 2025 to CHF 313.6 million (approximately $377 million).

Grand Casino Luzern, which launched mycasino.ch in 2019 with Paf supplying the platform, games and operations, is the largest online operator. Its online revenue was CHF 95.4 million (approximately $115 million) in 2025, down 3.07% on the year and about 30% of the market, according to the ESBK, on which it paid CHF 48.3 million in casino levy. Paf puts mycasino.ch's revenue at more than €100 million a year.

Advertising unauthorised gambling is already illegal. Article 74 of the Gambling Act states, in translation, that "advertising for games of chance not authorised in Switzerland is prohibited", and anyone who does so intentionally can be fined up to CHF 500,000 (approximately $600,000), according to the ESBK. The regulator updates its list of blocked unauthorised sites four times a year. In 2025 it had 580 new domains blocked, almost 30% more than a year earlier, carried out 28 house searches and ended the year with 209 open criminal investigations. The supply of illegal online games "continued to increase strongly" in 2025, the ESBK said in its report, in translation. The blocklist passed 2,900 domains in February.

Meta's own rules already require advertisers to obtain its written permission before running online gambling ads and to show that the activity is licensed or lawful in each territory they target. The difficulty is advertisers who never apply. A Rest of World investigation published in January found nearly 1,000 gambling ads running in Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and other countries where local laws prohibit such advertising, and noted the policy's statement that Meta is "not responsible for how authorized ad accounts comply with local gambling laws and regulations".

Paf Is Offering Meta the Licence Check VNLOK Is Suing For

The pilot's logic is the same as the Dutch operators' court case, reached by a different route. VNLOK wants a judge to order Meta to verify licences before gambling ads run, after finding that Meta removed 11% of more than 60,000 illegal ads in May and 15% in June. Paf is supplying the verification data itself. Switzerland is a sensible place to test it, because the list of lawful online gambling providers is short: at the end of 2025, nine online casinos and two lottery monopolies. An allowlist that small is much easier for a platform to apply than one covering dozens of licensees in the Netherlands or Brazil, where Brazil's Attorney General's Office gave Meta 48 hours to remove unauthorised betting ads in 2025. If the model works anywhere, it should work here.

Meta Has Confirmed Nothing, and Paf Has a Commercial Stake

Everything known about the pilot comes from Paf. Meta has not described it, no terms have been published, and Eliasson told iGB the agreement was reached on the day he announced it. Paf is also not a neutral party. Eliasson said protecting mycasino.ch's position "is a business question about growing further in the market", and the ESBK's figures show Grand Casino Luzern's online revenue fell 3.07% in 2025 while the market grew. That does not make the pilot less useful, since a licensed operator has every reason to report competitors that pay no Swiss casino levy, but it makes the test results rather than intent: how many ads and accounts are removed, how quickly, and whether the Swiss regulator, which Paf has not said has agreed to take part, joins.

Voluntary Cooperation Is Being Tested Alongside Compulsion

Platforms are being pressed from several directions at once. VNLOK is in court, Dutch MPs backed a motion on 29 September asking the government to make repeat publication of illegal gambling ads a finable offence, and Brazil has given platforms a legal duty of care over betting content. Paf's own release concedes that sharing data with platforms "does not take us all the way". A pilot that produces published numbers would give regulators evidence of what voluntary cooperation can do, and of where compulsion is still needed.

A data-sharing pilot announced by one operator is a modest step next to a court summons. If Paf and Meta publish what it achieves in Switzerland, it will show whether licence checks can be run cheaply enough to scale; if they do not, the courts will keep deciding instead.