Giving away iPhones sounds like normal influencer activation. But if you require people to follow an online casino brand to win one, things can apparently get complicated.
PAGCOR recently fined a licensed online casino operator ₱1 million over the giveaway promoted by Ivana Alawi in July. According to PAGCOR chairman Alejandro Tengco, the company ran the promotion without getting the regulator’s approval. As a result, the operator paid the fine and stopped the campaign.
Tengco didn’t name the operator during the House budget hearing, but the connection isn’t difficult to make. Everyone knows that Alawi became a Casino Plus brand ambassador in May, and the discussion about the iPhone giveaway was all over social media.
When does a giveaway become an ad?
Alawi’s video wasn’t a casino ad telling people to deposit ₱500 and start playing scatter. It was a giveaway – the kind of content influencers have been doing for years. But to have a chance at one of the free iPhones, people had to follow the page connected to the casino. That’s a pretty powerful lead generation tactic when the person sending the message has millions of followers.
PAGCOR said this promotion should have been submitted for approval. The ₱1 million fine tells us that putting casino promotion inside influencer content doesn’t change the law.
A PAGCOR license isn’t a free pass
There’s another useful lesson here. We often see “PAGCOR licensed” used like a quality badge. A casino displays the logo, and the conversation ends there. But it shouldn’t.
A PAGCOR license means the casino is regulated, but such an operator can still break the rules. The good thing is that in serious or repeated cases, a casino can potentially lose the license (though we haven’t seen any such cases yet).
So, like we discussed many times before, we should not see a celebrity endorsement or even a PAGCOR logo on a casino website as enough evidence that everything an operator is doing has PAGCOR’s blessing. The current license status still needs to be checked on a regular basis.
₱1 million isn’t the most important number in this story
For a big casino business, the ₱1 million fine is not that significant, but the warning itself could be. PAGCOR and the Ad Standards Council have already tightened the rules for gambling advertising, and more scrutiny is coming after the influencers too.
Somehow it makes sense. If a casino billboard needs approval, moving the same marketing message into a creator post should too.
