Affiliate marketing is the primary customer-acquisition engine of the online gambling industry — legitimate when disclosed and compliant, and a serious harm vector when it isn't. Research Entain itself published as part of open-source intelligence work identified around 30 unlicensed operators, including Stake.com, Duelbits and RainBet, being promoted through a coordinated network of celebrities, influencers and betting "tipsters" — content that, Entain found, was reaching audiences as young as 14.
The mechanism is well studied. A 2024 Australian study in the International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction, drawing on interviews across 28 operators, affiliates, regulators and support services, found that affiliate marketers are financially incentivised to target high-loss-potential and at-risk bettors, since their commission structures reward volume and frequency rather than player welfare. A separate university-focused US investigation by the Arnolt Center for Investigative Journalism documented students accumulating four- and five-figure debts on offshore sites accessed largely through informal, peer and social-media channels rather than mainstream advertising — a pattern regulators in multiple jurisdictions have flagged as especially hard to police because it rarely resembles conventional marketing at all.
Entain's managing director Bejay Patel called the scale of coordinated illegal promotion a "wake-up call" for regulators, arguing existing enforcement tools were not built for marketing that moves through Discord servers, tipster channels and AI-generated personas rather than licensed ad inventory. The core enforcement gap identified across this research is consistent: regulation targets licensed operators' own marketing effectively, but has far less reach into the informal affiliate layer that increasingly does the actual recruiting.