Largest single addition of the current mandate
Romania’s National Office for Gambling (ONJN) added approximately 800 illegal gambling sites to the national blacklist on 31 July 2026, the regulator’s Supervisory Committee said. The addition is more than double the previous record of around 370 domains, set earlier in the same mandate.
ONJN has spent years blocking unlicensed domains one at a time, only for the same operators to reappear within days under near-identical addresses. The blacklist is the register the Office uses to identify domains with no right to offer gambling to players in Romania. Entries are made by decision of the Supervisory Committee and published on ONJN’s website with annexes listing the affected domains.
ONJN says approximately 1,500 illegal sites were blacklisted between the Office’s establishment in 2013 and April 2025, and approximately 1,180 since the current mandate began. Polymarket, the prediction-market platform facing similar pushback from regulators elsewhere in Europe, is among the platforms added to the list over that period.
Clone-site detection behind the volume
ONJN attributes the scale of the latest action to a newly developed clone-site detection tool. The tool identifies platforms that keep the same underlying root and multiply through different domains, the pattern that has made domain-level blocking hard to sustain: a blocked brand can resurface almost immediately on a fresh address.
The tool changes the unit of enforcement from a single domain to a root platform and its variants, which is why one Supervisory Committee decision could add close to 800 addresses at once rather than the smaller batches ONJN has issued in the past.
Budget and staffing limits shape the approach
ONJN president Vlad-Cristian Soare framed the enforcement gap as a European problem rather than a Romanian one, and said the Office’s own constraints leave it little choice but to automate.
“The black market is a systemic problem at European level. Over 70% of the European online gambling market consists of operators active on the black market.”
Soare said that with budgetary constraints, no scope to expand the staffing scheme, and difficulty attracting IT specialists on a net salary of approximately 6,000 lei per month, the only route open to the Office is adapting the legislation and accelerating its digitalisation.
Legislative changes and monitoring tools
On the legislative side, Soare said the law has already been amended to let ONJN issue orders for the removal of illegal content. He added that the amendment has made Romania the only country to have a public registry of gaming devices, QR codes on machines that give access to the registry data when scanned, and geolocation systems for gaming devices. Those tools apply to Romania’s retail gaming machine network, a parallel enforcement track that runs alongside the domain blacklist used against online operators.
The Office says it has the budget allocated and, with support from the Romanian Digitalisation Authority, is launching a procedure to develop monitoring instruments built as far as possible on the government private cloud. Soare said that following the acquisition of access to online operators’ servers, the volume of metadata now available requires advanced digital tools for analysis and for obtaining the intended results.
“Today’s results show that the institution is exercising its authority, strengthening its control capacity, and taking important steps in the transition from a reactive approach to one based on technology, data, and rapid intervention.”
The clone-site tool addresses volume, not the underlying incentive: operators that lose one domain still have a licence-free market to sell into, and Soare’s own figure puts more than 70% of the European online gambling market in the hands of black-market operators. Whether the new detection system cuts the reappearance rate, or simply keeps pace with it, will show up in the size of ONJN’s next blacklist addition.
Source: National Office for Gambling (ONJN)
