Influencers and illegal gambling: Argentina’s criminal enforcement model

For the first time in Latin America, social media influencers face criminal charges for operating illegal online gambling recruitment systems. Furthermore, some have leveraged their own social media platforms to disseminate a corrective message. This breakthrough has been achieved through a criminal enforcement model to control influencer marketing.

The Fiscalía Especializada en Juegos de Azar (FEJA) – the Specialized Gambling Prosecution Unit of the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires, the first of its kind in Latin America – has taken an unprecedented step in the region: bringing criminal charges against social media influencers for operating recruitment networks for illegal online gambling platforms. This article examines that enforcement experience, the legal underlying framework, and, most significantly, the model of restorative justice that has emerged: a series of formal agreements whereby influencers used the very social media channels that previously served as illegal recruitment tools to broadcast a public message concerning the harms of illegal gambling, addiction, and the specific risks faced by children and adolescents. This piece also positions the Argentine experience within a comparative context, where most jurisdictions have addressed influencer marketing in gambling through administrative or regulatory mechanisms. Criminal liability, and the creative remedies it facilitates, represents a qualitatively different approach.

Introduction

Illegal online gambling suffers from a visibility problem, and social media influencers are the solution. Across Latin America, unlicensed gambling platforms have discovered that the most effective way to reach new players is not through conventional advertising, but via influencers: individuals with large, loyal, and highly engaged followings who promote these platforms through posts, referral links, and bonus codes, directing their audiences seamlessly into the platform’s recruitment infrastructure. The scale of the resulting black market is striking; in Argentina, private estimates suggest that more than 90 percent of online gambling activity occurs on unlicensed platforms.^[1] The influencer, in this ecosystem, is not a peripheral actor; they are the primary gateway.

Argentina’s figures are not exceptional. An industry study estimated that, throughout the European Union, unregulated operators accounted for 71 percent of the online gambling market in 2024 (totaling approximately €80.6 billion in gross gaming revenue, with associated annual tax losses for EU member states valued at €20 billion).^[2] In the United States, the American Gaming Association estimates that illegal operators attract $673.6 billion in annual wagers, a volume that has grown by 38 percent since 2022 despite the rapid expansion of legal alternatives.^[3] The illegal market is not a transient residue of inadequate legal options. It is a durable and self-sustaining structure, and its longevity depends on its ability to recruit.

What happens, then, when a legal system decides to treat the “front door” as part of the criminal structure it facilitates? That is precisely the question that Argentina’s specialized gambling prosecution unit – the Fiscalía Especializada en Juegos de Azar, or FEJA – has brought to the fore. For the first time in the region, a criminal enforcement model to control influencer marketing means social media influencers have faced criminal charges not for the content of their posts, but for the functional impact of those posts: operating a capture system for illegal gambling platforms. And in several cases, the resolution of those charges has produced something genuinely novel: a mechanism that leverages the influencers’ own platforms and audiences to counteract their previous activities.

FEJA: A Specialized Prosecution Unit Built for a Digital Problem

The FEJA was established by Resolution FG 73/2024 of the Public Prosecutor’s Office of the City of Buenos Aires. It operates under Argentina’s federal system, in which gambling regulation is constitutionally reserved to the provinces and the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires. In Buenos Aires, the competent authority for gambling licenses is LOTBA – Lotería de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires S.A.U – a public entity established by city law to authorize, organize, and supervise all gambling activities within its territory.^[4] Any gambling operation targeting Buenos Aires residents without LOTBA authorization is illegal, and FEJA’s mandate is to investigate and prosecute those entities.

The case for building a specialized unit for this purpose may not be immediately self-evident to everyone, but it is essential. Digital gambling investigations are technically demanding in ways that general criminal prosecutors are not equipped to handle without dedicated training, such as identifying unlicensed platforms among thousands of online operators, collecting and preserving digital evidence from social media and messaging apps, tracing financial flows through virtual wallets and informal payment networks, and understanding the architecture of multi-actor criminal systems that span multiple jurisdictions and platforms. Specialization is not a luxury; it is a prerequisite for effective enforcement.

FEJA’s results since its inception demonstrate the return on that investment. The unit has initiated investigations against more than 500 individuals and has developed, through direct operational experience, both a legal theory and a set of enforcement tools that have no precise precedent in the region.

Influencers as Operators of Illegal Gambling Capture Systems

The legal framework applied by FEJA is Article 301 bis of the Argentine Criminal Code, incorporated in 2016. The provision penalizes anyone who exploits, administers, operates, or in any manner organizes (personally or through third parties) any modality or system for the capture of gambling without the authorization of the competent jurisdictional authority. The penalty ranges from three to six years’ imprisonment.

What makes this provision well-suited to the digital gambling context is its focus on the “capture system” rather than the platform itself. An illegal online gambling operation is not a single actor; it is a decentralized structure. The platform’s technical operators oversee the software and manage the mechanics of the game. The “Cashiers” – a network of informal intermediaries – create user accounts, receive deposits via digital payment apps, handle withdrawals, and communicate with players through rotating messaging accounts. Finally, influencers sit at the top of the recruitment funnel: they reach mass audiences through their social media channels, post promotional content with referral links and bonus codes, and direct their followers into the cashier network. Each component of this structure operates a distinct but essential part of the same illegal capture system.

The influencer’s role within that structure is not incidental. Without effective mass recruitment, without the ability to convert followers into gamblers at scale, the unlicensed platform cannot compete for market share. This point has been analyzed in depth by Argentine legal scholars^[5] and is reflected in the enforcement data accumulated by FEJA: the promotional activity of influencers is systematic, professional, and commercially structured, incorporating agreed fees, referral bonuses, and content calendars. It is, in every functional sense, the operation of a recruitment system. Argentina has established a clear and publicly available marker of licensed gambling – the “.bet.ar” domain, reserved by regulation for authorized operators^[6] – meaning that influencers who promoted platforms outside that domain had an objective, easily verifiable basis for assessing legality, yet chose to proceed regardless.

A Regional First: Criminal Charges Against Influencers in Illegal Gambling

The decision to pursue criminal charges against influencers under Article 301 bis represents to the first known instance in the Latin American region of social media influencers facing criminal prosecution specifically for operating the recruitment systems of illegal online gambling platforms. The scale of the investigation is also notable, because FEJA has brought charges against hundreds of individuals, not as a symbolic action, but as a systematic effort to reach the entire visible layer of the illegal gambling recruitment infrastructure.

The influencers charged range from major public figures with millions of followers to smaller-scale content creators operating in niche gaming communities. What they share is a pattern of conduct: regular posts and stories on Instagram and similar platforms, with links directing followers to the cashier networks of unlicensed gambling platforms. In many cases, the same influencer simultaneously promoted several competing illegal platforms, behavior that confirms the commercial and independent nature of their activity.

A foundational jurisdictional question – could the city’s courts prosecute influencers physically located outside Buenos Aires? – was resolved in FEJA’s favor by two decisions of the city’s Criminal Appeals Court.^[7] Both chambers applied the well-established principle of territorial ubiquity: an offense is committed wherever its effects materialize, and the recruitment activity of influencers based outside the city nonetheless produced its effects within it, capturing Buenos Aires residents and directing them toward unlicensed platforms operating without LOTBA’s authorization.^[8]

Turning the Channel Around: The Reparation Agreement Model

The most distinctive and instructive aspect of FEJA’s enforcement experience is not the criminal charges themselves; it is the resolution of cases without going to trial.

Argentine procedural law provides for an alternative resolution mechanism (the reparation agreement) through which criminal liability can be extinguished by full reparation of the harm caused, subject to judicial approval.^[9] To date, FEJA has reached dozens of such agreements with influencers who were investigated for promoting illegal online gambling platforms. Those agreements, all validated by trial court judges after a legality review, were not simply financial: they required the influencers to complete a specialized awareness course organized by LOTBA (covering the legal framework for gambling in the city, the harms associated with unlicensed platforms, and the mechanisms available to players to verify whether a platform is authorized) and, most significantly, to produce and publish a series of videos on their own social media accounts.

Those videos were not generic disclaimers. They required the influencers to speak directly to their own audiences (the very same audiences they had previously used to recruit gamblers toward illegal platforms) about the specific problems caused by illegal online gambling, such as the absence of consumer protections, the impossibility of auditing game outcomes, the lack of age verification and the exposure of children and adolescents to unregulated gambling, and the risks of gambling addiction, including its particular prevalence among younger users.

The conceptual logic of this approach deserves to be stated clearly, as it is what makes it genuinely novel. The harm caused by the influencer’s promotional activity was not merely economic; it was communicational. They had used a powerful channel of social influence, built on personal trust and audience loyalty, to normalize and facilitate illegal gambling. The reparation required them to use that same channel, that same trust, and that same reach, to deliver the opposite message. The instrument of harm became the instrument of remedy.

This is a form of restorative justice calibrated to the specific nature of digital harm, and it would not have been available without the criminal framework that made the investigation possible in the first place.

Criminal Accountability in Context: A Comparative Note

The regulation of influencer marketing in gambling has become a critical issue in multiple jurisdictions in recent years, and it is useful to contextualize Argentina’s approach within that broader picture.^[10]

In most jurisdictions, influencers who promote gambling – whether licensed or unlicensed – face administrative or regulatory consequences: fines from advertising standards bodies, warnings from gambling regulators, or content removal orders. Norway offers an instructive example of how far administrative tools can reach: the Norwegian Gaming Authority successfully disrupted an entire influencer collective promoting legal gambling platforms through a single regulatory notice, which led to the voluntary shutdown of their operation within hours.^[11] The efficiency of that outcome, however, was possible precisely because the influencers involved were operating in a regulated context and had reputational incentives to comply. The illegal market offers no such leverage.

Other jurisdictions have pursued the illegal market at the platform level rather than the individual level. The United Kingdom’s Gambling Commission removed more than 95,000 illegal gambling websites in 2024 through partnerships with internet service providers and search engines.^[12] Denmark’s gambling authority entered a formal cooperation agreement with Twitch (the live-streaming platform that has become a primary vector for gambling promotion directed at younger audiences) to restrict the promotion of unlicensed platforms on the service.^[13] These are efficient tools for reducing the visibility of the illegal market. However, they address the channels through which illegal recruitment occurs, not the individuals who animate those channels or the structures those individuals operate. An unlicensed platform blocked on one domain or one platform can resurface elsewhere within hours.

France has gone further, criminalizing the promotional activity itself: legislation passed in 2023 makes it a criminal offense, carrying up to two years’ imprisonment and a EUR 300,000 fine, for influencers to create paid content promoting online gambling. Germany and the Netherlands have adopted broadly similar legislative approaches.^[14] These are meaningful steps, but they are addressed primarily to the content of the advertising rather than to the role of the influencer within the illegal gambling structure. The offense is the promotion; the unlicensed nature of the platform is one element of the analysis, not the structural focus.

Argentina’s framework is different in emphasis. Article 301 bis does not criminalize the promotion of gambling, it criminalizes the operation of an illegal capture system. When FEJA charges an influencer under that provision, it is not contending that they published unauthorized advertising; it is asserting that they operated a component of a criminal enterprise. That distinction has practical consequences. It places the influencer within the criminal structure rather than outside it, and it opens the door to the kind of systemic, multi-actor investigation (covering platform operators, cashiers, and recruiters simultaneously) that administrative frameworks cannot support. It also, as the reparation agreements demonstrate, creates space for remedies tailored to the specific social harm that was caused.

Conclusions

The FEJA experience offers several lessons that extend well beyond Argentina. First, specialization in gambling prosecution produces results that generalist enforcement cannot. The technical sophistication required to investigate digital gambling networks, building criminal cases against distributed multi-actor systems, and developing effective enforcement demands dedicated institutional capacity.

Second, the criminal framework – precisely because it is more demanding than administrative regulation – enables more creative and proportionate outcomes. The reparation agreements that emerged from FEJA’s influencer investigations are possible only because the criminal process created both the leverage and the procedural vehicle for structured remediation. That is not an argument for using criminal law indiscriminately; it is an argument for having it available. And there is growing empirical evidence that active enforcement correlates with legal market growth rather than impeding it: a September 2025 study found that US states with enforcement actions against illegal gambling operators experienced 10 percent higher year-on-year growth in active legal players and 39 percent higher growth in new accounts compared with states that took no enforcement action.^[15] Enforcement investment and market development are not in tension, they reinforce each other.

Third, and most importantly, the Argentine experience demonstrates that influencer marketing in illegal gambling is not simply an advertising compliance problem. It is a structural feature of how the illegal market functions, and it deserves to be addressed as such, with tools proportionate to its role. This is precisely what is currently unfolding in the region.

Practice Points

• For the first time in the Latin American region, social media influencers have faced criminal charges for operating the recruitment systems of illegal online gambling platforms under Article 301 bis of the Argentine Criminal Code. This provision targeting the illegal capture system rather than the content of promotional material.
• Dozens of judicially approved reparation agreements have required influencers to complete a LOTBA-organized gambling awareness course and to produce and publish videos on their own social media accounts addressing the harms of illegal gambling, addiction, and the risks to children and adolescents, thereby repurposing the channel and audience previously deployed for illegal recruitment.
• Argentina’s criminal enforcement approach stands in contrast to the administrative and regulatory tools used in most other jurisdictions; it situates influencers within the illegal gambling structure rather than addressing the content of their promotional activity in isolation, enabling systemic investigations and remedies calibrated to the specific social harm caused.
• Emerging empirical data from the United States supports the argument that active criminal enforcement of illegal gambling generates legal market growth: enforcement states showed 10 percent higher year-on-year growth in active legal players and 39 percent higher growth in new accounts compared with non-enforcement states.

^[1]Tomas Enrique Garcia Botta, ‘Argentina: could weak enforcement of the law endanger a regulated ecosystem?’ IMGL Magazine Vol. 5 No. 3 (September 2025) https://www.imgl.org/publications/imgl-magazine-volume-3-no-1/argentina-could-weak-enforcement-of-the-law-endanger-a-regulated-ecosystem/

^[2]Luis Portela de Carvalho and Marta Botica Santos, ‘Fighting the black market – the infinite game,’ IMGL Magazine Vol. 6 No. 1 (March 2026). https://www.imgl.org/publications/imgl-magazine-volume-3-no-1/a-different-approach-to-tackling-unregulated-gambling/

^[3]Bill Miller, ‘Protecting the legal gaming ecosystem – one illegal market at a time,’ IMGL Magazine Vol. 6 No. 1 (March 2026) https://www.imgl.org/publications/imgl-magazine-volume-3-no-1/protecting-the-legal-gaming-ecosystem-one-illegal-market-at-a-time/

^[4]Argentine National Constitution, Article 121. Law 5,785 of the City of Buenos Aires creates LOTBA S.A.U. as the competent authority for authorizing, organizing, and supervising gambling in Buenos Aires.

^[5]Rodolfo Ariza Clerici and Maximiliano Ruiz, ‘Influencers y las apuestas ilegales en línea,’ La Ley, Derecho Penal y Criminología, Year XV, No. 11 (December 2025).

^[6]Disposición 68/2019, Dirección Nacional del Registro de Dominios de Internet (DNRDI).

^[7]CCyAPPJCF, Sala I, case 94.102/2024-0 (April 3, 2025); Sala III, case 100178/2024-1 (December 27, 2024).

^[8] Argentina’s Supreme Court (CSJN, Fallos 313:823).

^[9]Argentine Criminal Code, Article 59(6), as amended by Law 27,147.

^[10]Luis Portela de Carvalho, ‘Influencer marketing in gambling and gaming,’ IMGL Magazine Vol. 3. No. 3 (July 2023); Phil Savage, ‘Regulating influencer marketing in gaming and gambling,’ IMGL Magazine Vol. 5 No. 4 (December 2025). https://www.imgl.org/publications/imgl-magazine-volume-3-no-1/regulating-influencer-marketing-in-gaming-and-gambling/

^[11]Savage, op. cit.

^[12]Portela de Carvalho and Botica Santos, op. cit.

^[13]Portela de Carvalho and Botica Santos, op. cit.

^[14]Savage, op. cit.

^[15]Miller, op. cit.

About the Author

Rodrigo N. Branca serves as Principal Legal Officer (Secretario) of the Specialized Gambling Prosecution Unit (Fiscalía Especializada en Juegos de Azar – FEJA), Public Prosecutor’s Office of the City of Buenos Aires. As Secretario, he functions as the immediate deputy to Lead Prosecutor Dr. Juan Rozas, heads the unit’s investigative and legal teams, and acts as certifying officer for all formal proceedings (a role equivalent, in civil law terms, to a senior principal legal officer and deputy chief of a specialized prosecution unit). He has been directly involved in the investigations, prosecution strategy, and reparation agreements described in this article and can be reached at rbranca@fiscalias.gob.ar.