LONDON, Jan 20 (Reuters) - Britain's Gambling Commission said on Monday that Meta Platforms, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, was turning a blind eye to illegal online casinos advertising on its sites, indicating it was happy to continue taking money from criminals.
The independent regulator's executive director Tim Miller said that anyone who has spent even a little time on Meta's platforms would more than likely have seen ads in their feed for illegal online casinos.
Most notably, many of the ads were for sites that did not participate in Britain's "GamStop" self-exclusion scheme for online gambling, he said.
Meta's assertion that it did not know about such ads until it was notified was "simply false", he said in a speech at the ICE Barcelona trade show, according to the text on the Gambling Commission's website.
"It could leave you with the impression they are quite happy to turn a blind eye and continue taking money from criminals and scammers until someone shouts about it," he said.
When asked for comment, Meta said it enforced strict advertising policies regarding online gambling and gaming ads, and any ads that violated these policies were promptly removed once identified.
"We've been working closely with the Commission to identify and remove all the flagged ads found in violation of our policies, and we're using this intelligence to further improve the proactive detection tools we already have in place," a spokesperson said.
"We would encourage the Commission to continue to collaborate with us to ensure users and legitimate advertisers are protected from these bad actors."
Miller said in his speech Meta's searchable ad library showed which advertisers said their sites were "Not on GamStop".
"If we can find them then so can Meta," he said. "They simply choose not to look."
(Reporting by Paul Sandle; Editing by Hugh Lawson and Tomasz Janowski)
