Fake Netflix Casino ads run wild on Meta with a forged Italian license

Facebook and Instagram users in Italy are seeing ads for something calling itself Netflix Casino. Netflix has no connection to it. The operator running it doesn’t appear anywhere on Italy’s list of licensed gambling platforms either, which makes the whole campaign illegal from the ground up before you even get to how it’s being sold.

The ads don’t just borrow the Netflix name and hope nobody checks. They display what looks like an actual license number from ADM, Italy’s gambling regulator — an investigation by industry press found the license to be fabricated. Beyond that, whoever built this campaign put together fake versions of real Italian news outlets: pages styled to look like La Repubblica, Corriere della Sera, and La Gazzetta dello Sport, each carrying invented stories about huge jackpot wins and payouts landing fast. Add fabricated user reviews, screenshotted WhatsApp chats, PostePay payment receipts, and winner lists, plus pages dressed up as an actual App Store listing complete with a made-up developer name, download counts, and star ratings, and you get a campaign built almost entirely out of manufactured social proof.

Click through and the Netflix branding vanishes immediately. Whoever lands on the site gets redirected somewhere else entirely, a different illegal gambling platform asking for registration and a deposit before the user has time to notice the switch. Investigators haven’t been able to tie the full set of domains involved back to one single operator, so whether this is one group running a network or several groups sharing a similar playbook remains unclear.

The pattern is a copy of something that already ran once — an earlier scheme built on Amazon’s name used the same structure, fake branding, fabricated legitimacy, images of Jeff Bezos and influencer Khaby Lame lending credibility they never actually gave. Amazon publicly denied any connection, and ADM confirmed none of the platforms involved held a license to operate in Italy. Whoever’s behind Netflix Casino appears to be running the exact same script with a different brand name stapled on top, which suggests it worked well enough the first time to be worth repeating.