Paf teams up with Facebook on Swiss pilot to target black market ads

Just days after Dutch trade body VNLOK served Meta with a court summons over illegal gambling ads on Facebook and Instagram, a Nordic operator has chosen a different route: working with the tech giant rather than suing it.

Paf, the gambling operator controlled by the Government of Åland and the technology partner behind Swiss market leader mycasino.ch, has agreed a pilot scheme with Facebook aimed at stopping illegal operators from reaching Swiss players through the platform. Work is due to begin next week.

Jesper Eliasson, chief business development officer at Paf, broke the news on Wednesday during SBC Summit Lisbon’s “Scandinavia: High Tax, High Standards, High Stakes” panel. The discussion with LeoVegas, FDJ United and the Danish Gambling Authority quickly turned to the black market.

Eliasson said Paf will share certain data with Meta as part of the pilot. That includes licence documents and URLs, so Meta can build a clearer picture of who is regulated and who is not. It covers both operators and affiliates.

Speaking to iGB afterwards, Eliasson said the agreement was “absolutely fresh. We decided it today.”

He had met with Facebook representatives in Lisbon earlier in the day alongside Wolfgang Bliem, CEO of Grand Casino Luzern, which owns mycasino.ch. The site now generates more than €100m in annual revenue. Eliasson declined to name who represented Facebook.

The challenge, he said, is that offshore operators use creatives that work around Facebook’s systems, while Europe’s patchwork of licensing makes their claims hard to verify. “The licence may come from somewhere else, and it can be hard to detect in that mess of jurisdictions,” he said. “So we’re focusing on Switzerland to see whether we can build a model there that can then be scaled to other jurisdictions.”

He also pointed to crypto casinos exploiting what he has called “toothless jurisdictions”.

Why Switzerland?

For Eliasson, the choice of market is personal as well as strategic. “I’m personally very engaged there; I’m responsible for our Swiss business and the partnership with Grand Casino Luzern,” he said. “For me it’s a business question about growing further in the market.”

Mycasino.ch launched in 2019. Eliasson said that “after 16 months we were a €70 million business and clear market leader”, and the brand now holds more than 30% of the market. Protecting that position is the point. “I don’t want someone who doesn’t have a licence, hasn’t paid for the licence and the compliance work, and doesn’t take responsible gaming measures to share the market,” he said.

Working alongside Facebook

Paf is investing “nothing. Only time and talks” and plans to bring the Swiss regulator into the process. “We want to connect Facebook with the Swiss regulator too, and put everybody around the table,” Eliasson said.

The reveal drew a muted response from the audience. “I don’t think they believed it. Normally you sue Facebook,” he said. But Paf spends substantial sums acquiring customers on the platform, and Eliasson believes Facebook shares its interest because “they don’t want illegal business on the platform”.

Regulatory weak points in Switzerland

Eliasson also warned that heavy-handed product rules, such as slowing games down or banning titles deemed “too risky”, could backfire. “People are still free to use the internet, so they’ll go elsewhere for the best product,” he said. “If politicians get too scared, we could easily end up with the reverse effect.”

Bliem had set out the Swiss model a day earlier, on a panel about Austrian and Swiss regulation. Online licences are tied exclusively to land-based casinos and taxed progressively from 20% to 80%. He named two weak points: the lack of payment blocking and the lotteries’ monopoly on sports betting. That monopoly sends Swiss customers offshore for better odds during events such as this year’s World Cup.

Eliasson admitted the outcome is uncertain. “I’m not sure whether we’ll succeed, but I’m 100% sure we’ve succeeded with the first step,” he said. If the pilot falls short, Paf will “rework it and find something else”.

Either way, he made clear that Paf intends to keep working with Facebook against illegal operators. “We have good conversations, and they don’t want illegal operators,” he said. “So we’ll work on it together and see if we succeed.”

Eliasson also said if the pilot is succesful, he wants the Swiss experiment to be expanded to other markets, hoping to set a precedent across Europe.