From blacklisting 300 illegal sites to launching the first state-funded problem gambling treatment programme, Romania's ONJN has used its opening mandate year to signal it means business. The hard work of sustaining that momentum now begins.
Romania's National Office for Gambling has laid out a detailed account of its first mandate year, and the picture that emerges is of a regulator that inherited a compliance infrastructure in serious disrepair and has spent twelve months building the foundations of something substantially more capable. The report, covering April 2025 to April 2026, documents enforcement activity, digital reform, the first state-funded problem gambling treatment programme in the country's history and a candid acknowledgement of the shortcomings it found when it took office.
ONJN president Vlad-Cristian Soare set the tone in his accompanying remarks, describing change as possible but hard-won, and acknowledging that the reforms encountered resistance from both inside and outside the organisation. That level of candour from a regulatory chief is unusual and suggests a deliberate strategy of transparency as part of a broader effort to establish institutional credibility.
The enforcement numbers are substantial. Over the past year ONJN issued more than 60 illegal content removal orders and blacklisted over 300 unlicensed gambling websites, a level of activity that reflects both expanded legal authority and a more proactive approach to the black market. Legislative amendments through Law no 141/2025 were central to enabling that activity, granting ONJN the power to order removal of illegal gambling content and requiring class II operators to submit monthly reports detailing player attempts to access unlicensed platforms. That second provision is particularly notable: it turns licensed operators into a monitoring layer for black market activity, creating a regular intelligence stream on where unlicensed sites are drawing traffic.
The investigation into GGR manipulation and unpaid tax discrepancies represents a more serious category of enforcement. Filing 70 criminal complaints and revoking 60 licences in response to such infringements sends a clear signal that ONJN is prepared to pursue the most consequential forms of non-compliance through the criminal justice system rather than relying solely on administrative sanctions.
The "Aware and Free" programme marks a historic first for Romania. Previous responsible gambling activity had not been backed by formal state funding, and the €5 million allocation represents the conversion of previously unallocated resources into tangible support for vulnerable gamblers. The funding is divided across NGO-led prevention projects, infrastructure investment in publicly managed addiction treatment centres and research support, a structure that distributes resources across prevention, treatment and evidence-building simultaneously. Implementation begins in August and runs to December.
The self-exclusion situation ONJN inherited was striking in its scale. More than 30,000 unresolved requests had accumulated before the current mandate began. The system now covers approximately 54,000 self-excluded individuals, suggesting that the backlog has been addressed while new exclusions have continued to be processed. The proposed Emergency Ordinance to harmonise self-exclusion across land-based and online operators would represent the next significant step, creating a unified framework with teeth in the form of licence suspensions and substantial fines for operators that fail to enforce exclusions properly. The fact that it currently awaits government approval at the Ministry of Finance is the most significant outstanding item on ONJN's reform agenda.
The digital register of gaming devices is among the most technically ambitious elements of the year's work. Described by ONJN as a first-of-its-kind mechanism in Europe, the cloud-native system provides real-time data on every registered gaming machine in the country including location, ownership, licence validity and manufacturer. The requirement for each device to carry a QR code linking to its register entry and mandatory geolocation tracking transforms machine oversight from a periodic administrative exercise into continuous real-time monitoring. ONJN was candid that earlier reports from the Romanian Court of Accounts had identified serious shortcomings in oversight capacity, stemming from a lack of digital infrastructure and an inability to access operator server data. The register is the direct operational response to those findings.
Across approximately 11,000 control activities, ONJN issued roughly 10 million lei in fines, with land-based operators accounting for the largest share of both inspections and penalties. The confiscation or disabling of 260 gaming devices adds a physical enforcement dimension to the administrative and criminal activity documented elsewhere in the report.
The Digital Infrastructure Investment Is the Reform That Will Outlast Everything Else
Much of what ONJN has achieved in its first mandate year is operationally significant but reversible. Enforcement actions can slow down, blacklists can go stale and funding programmes can lose momentum. The digital register of gaming devices and the broader package of IT projects aimed at automating operator monitoring are different in kind. They represent infrastructure that, once built, changes the fundamental capacity of the regulator to exercise oversight on a continuous basis rather than through periodic inspections. A regulator that can see where every licensed gaming machine is located, who owns it and whether its licence is valid in real time is a materially more capable institution than one that relies on paper records and scheduled visits. The acknowledgement that earlier Court of Accounts reports identified serious gaps in this area makes the investment in digital infrastructure not just a modernisation project but a direct response to documented failure.
The Self-Exclusion Backlog Was a Consumer Protection Emergency
Inheriting more than 30,000 unresolved self-exclusion requests is not a minor administrative difficulty. Each of those unresolved requests represents an individual who sought protection from their own gambling behaviour and was not given it. The fact that the system now covers 54,000 individuals suggests meaningful progress, but the proposed Emergency Ordinance to create a unified framework across land-based and online operators remains the critical next step. A self-exclusion system that operates inconsistently across channels, with different processes and enforcement standards depending on whether a player is gambling online or in a physical venue, is structurally inadequate in a market where the same individual can move between both. The Ministry of Finance review of the ordinance should be treated as a priority rather than a routine administrative step.
Romania's Reforms Carry Lessons for the Wider Region
The ONJN report arrives at a moment when Romania has also been named as part of the newly established Balkan Gaming Federation, a body designed to coordinate policy, compliance and commercial activities across the West Balkans region. That regional context matters. Many of the markets in the Balkan area are at earlier stages of regulatory development than Romania, and the reforms ONJN has documented over the past year, particularly the digital device register, the unified self-exclusion framework and the structured approach to black market enforcement, represent a practical playbook that regional neighbours could draw on as they develop their own frameworks. Romania's candid acknowledgement of the shortcomings it inherited, and its systematic approach to addressing them, is the kind of institutional transparency that tends to produce durable rather than cosmetic regulatory improvement, and it is a model the region as a whole would benefit from adopting.
iGaming Times analysis: Romania's enforcement-first arc has become a model for mid-sized EU regulators — tighten the perimeter, prosecute unlicensed operators visibly, then liberalise responsibly once the licensed channel demonstrates resilience. The digital-transformation thread is what distinguishes ONJN's work from a pure enforcement story: regulators that pair enforcement with technical modernisation (real-time monitoring, central exclusion registers, API-based licensing data) can scale oversight without proportionate headcount growth. Operators should treat this as a leading indicator of where neighbouring CEE regulators are headed.
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