Romania’s gambling regulator ONJN has alleged that a number of licensed online operators may have engaged in systematic fraud designed to reduce their gross gaming revenue and, by extension, their tax liability to the state.
ONJN president Vlad-Cristian Soare disclosed the allegations publicly, citing access to operator mirror servers as the key that unlocked the investigation. The regulator did not have that access until the beginning of 2026 — a gap Soare said had its roots in failures that predated his appointment in April 2025 and had been flagged by Romania’s Court of Auditors in its 2023 report.
“At the time of my assumption of office, on April 25, 2025, ONJN did not have real access to the mirror servers of the remote gambling organisers. This situation has its origins in the past, being an aspect noted by the Court of Auditors in the report for 2023, a situation that was maintained throughout 2024,” Soare said.
Once mirror server access was established, the regulator began downloading event reports and analysing winnings above €15,000. What it found were prize patterns that, according to Soare, are statistically inconsistent with legitimate play.
The Alleged Pattern
The ONJN identified several online gaming accounts exhibiting what it described as anomalies incompatible with real winning probabilities. The prizes were large, repetitive, and paid in near-identical amounts — characteristics the regulator says point to artificial GGR deflation rather than genuine player activity.
In December 2025, one account recorded 60 wins totalling RON7.0 million (approximately €1.37 million). A second account showed 84 wins in what ONJN described as a very short space of time, totalling €2.60 million.
A third account registered 33 wins in October 2025 worth approximately €1.1 million, including 31 wins in a single day. The same account then recorded 45 wins in November 2025 — 32 of them on a single day — generating a further €1.2 million. Three additional accounts highlighted by the regulator had combined winnings exceeding €1.7 million, often concentrated within a single day.
“The pattern is obvious: numerous wins, concentrated on the same day or in the same month, in almost identical amounts and of very large values, which raises serious suspicions about the way the GGR is reported and calculated. All these aspects generate the legitimate suspicion that certain operators are reducing their tax base (GGR) by granting prizes to accounts held through intermediaries,” Soare said.
The suspected mechanism involves paying out substantial prizes to a small number of accounts — likely held through intermediaries — which inflates reported losses and reduces the net GGR on which operators are taxed. The ONJN has also found evidence of bonuses being deducted from GGR, which it says is prohibited under Romanian gambling legislation.
All suspect accounts are now under investigation. If the suspicions are confirmed, the cases will be referred to anti-money laundering authorities and the criminal prosecution service. Romania’s history of enforcement action against unlicensed operators suggests the regulator is prepared to escalate where its legal tools allow — though the fraud allegations against licensed operators represent a different and more complex enforcement challenge.
Separate Tax Recovery of RON100 Million
Alongside the fraud allegations, Soare disclosed a separate matter: the ONJN expects to recover RON100 million (approximately €19.6 million) from online gaming operators who applied an incorrect tax rate in 2023 and 2024.
The discrepancy arose from Government Decree no. 15/2022, which increased gambling taxes. Both the ONJN and licensed operators interpreted the decree as applying only to new authorisations, not pending ones. The Court of Auditors subsequently ruled that the higher rate applied to pending authorisations as well. Soare was explicit that this was a misinterpretation, not an attempt to defraud the state.
“The Court of Auditors invalidated this point of view and established that the new tax regime also applies to pending authorisations. Under my leadership, the checks were carried out, and the differences — amounting to RON100 million — were established and transmitted to ANAF,” Soare said.
ANAF is Romania’s National Agency for Fiscal Administration. The ONJN has also begun a parallel review of land-based operators to determine whether similar tax discrepancies exist under Executive Order no. 82/2023.
Regulatory Gaps and the Case for Reform
The revelations expose a significant structural weakness in Romania’s online gambling oversight. Without real-time access to operator servers, the regulator was, by its own admission, unable to carry out effective monitoring for the entirety of 2024. The rising cost of non-compliance across European markets has sharpened regulatory focus on exactly these gaps, and the Romanian case illustrates how consequential delayed access can be.
Soare used the occasion to call for a new gambling law, warning against the temptation to respond to the scandal with a blanket ban on gambling. He cited European Commission data showing that black market activity represented approximately 72% of total online gambling transactions across the EU in 2025, equating to roughly €80 billion.
“The real solution is a new gambling law: one built on the problems reported by civil society, which would strengthen the state’s supervision and allow serious operators to operate under strict control, enjoying predictability and, most importantly, eliminating the competitive advantage of those in the grey or black zone, against which no rules and no taxes apply,” Soare said.
The ONJN’s disclosures arrive as European regulators are broadly tightening oversight of online operators. Europe’s regulated GGR reached €123.4 billion in 2024, underlining the fiscal stakes involved when tax base manipulation goes undetected at scale. Whether Romania’s criminal prosecution service pursues formal charges will determine how far the current allegations develop — and how much pressure falls on other operators still under review.
Source: ONJN
