Three Markets, One Message: Illegal Ads Are Now Everyone's Problem

What's Happening

Three markets moved on gambling advertising within the same news cycle, and the directions aren't all the same — but the pressure on the industry is.

In Ukraine, the regulator has opened a public complaint form letting ordinary users report illegal gambling ads directly. Separately, PlayCity has teamed up with streaming platform Kick to actively pursue and remove illegal gambling promotions. In Colombia, the Council of State court suspended Coljuegos' marketing budget restrictions on licensed operators — a ruling that loosens the reins rather than tightening them, but only for those already inside the regulated tent. Meanwhile in the UK, Entain has gone public with research suggesting the vast majority of British consumers struggle to distinguish a legal betting site from an illegal one, and the company has escalated its concerns to football bodies and other stakeholders.

The Common Thread

Illegal operators and the platforms that carry their ads are the shared target. Each market is approaching the problem differently:

What ties them together is that licensed operators are increasingly doing enforcement work that regulators can't always do alone — whether that's partnering with streaming platforms, funding research, or lobbying sports bodies.

Why Consumer Confusion Is the Real Risk

Entain's finding that most UK consumers can't reliably tell legal from illegal sites isn't just a talking point. It means brand-safe traffic isn't guaranteed even for compliant operators: if users can't distinguish the product, affiliate networks and ad platforms are effectively directing some spend toward unlicensed sites without knowing it. Ukraine's crowdsourced reporting model and the PlayCity-Kick partnership both implicitly acknowledge the same problem — the ad ecosystem is too large for any single regulator to police top-down.

The Operator Takeaway

For B2B suppliers, affiliates, and ad-tech providers, the practical implications are stacking up:

• Affiliate networks operating in Ukraine now face the prospect of user-generated complaints, not just regulatory audits.
• Colombia's court ruling benefits licensed operators in the short term, but the underlying pressure on illegal advertising hasn't gone away.
• In the UK, operators who aren't visibly participating in the anti-illegal-gambling conversation risk being lumped in with the problem by association.

Compliance isn't just about your own licences anymore. It increasingly means vetting every point in the distribution chain — from the DSP to the streaming platform to the affiliate link.