Greece Becomes the First EU Country to Enforce Device-Based Gambling Ban for Minors
By age group, the rules are strict: children under 16 can no longer use social media at all, and anyone under 18 is completely blocked from gambling platforms or other “adult” digital content. Parents are required to activate these restrictions and verify the user’s age before device access is granted.
This is more than just another regulation. It’s a shift in paradigm: the responsibility no longer rests only with operators or websites, but also with the device itself and the parents. Until now, compliance was mainly about operators checking IDs or limiting ads. Now the control is embedded in the hardware and apps.
Greece rolled this out as part of a European Commission pilot program on digital identity and age verification. Similar initiatives are already being discussed in Spain, Italy, and Denmark. For operators and affiliates, this means stricter compliance requirements and the need to rethink everything from marketing channels to UX and traffic flows.
What it means for affiliates
If you’re promoting gambling or adult-related offers in the EU, especially in Greece, targeting will get much more complicated. You’ll need to be extra careful with how you manage audience segmentation and age verification.
Affiliate programs that don’t adapt to device-level restrictions risk losing traffic, facing sanctions, or even being shut out. Marketing through social networks will also become trickier, since a part of your audience could be literally unreachable due to enforced blocks.
On the flip side, this creates opportunities to work with programs that are already prepared for these compliance changes or to explore niches where age restrictions are less strict.
Greece has just shown that device-based bans are not only possible but enforceable — and this could easily set a precedent for other EU countries. If you’re working with European markets or planning to expand there, now is the time to start building strategies that factor in device-based age control.
