TonyBet's banned Irish ads are the latest in a long line of gambling promotions that promise easy money. Across Ireland, the UK, and the US, regulators are losing patience fast. The “Make Money While Sitting on the Toilet” debacle is just the tip of the iceberg

Man scrolling his phone on a toilet with cash nearby, a TonyBet casino chip in the centre, and a worried mother holding a baby with final notice.

Key Highlights

  • Two TonyBet YouTube ads were banned in Ireland for implying gambling is a source of income, not a form of entertainment.
  • One ad depicted a man gambling on the toilet; a second suggested a struggling mother earned $8,500 last month through betting.
  • TonyBet attributed both violations to a third-party affiliate partner and human error, insisting the breaches were not deliberate.
  • The ruling arrived just days after Ireland's new Gambling Regulatory Authority of Ireland began accepting operator licence applications in February 2026.

TonyBet Warned Over Its Misleading YouTube Ads

Ireland's Advertising Standards Authority upheld complaints against two TonyBet YouTube ads, both of which portrayed gambling as a reliable way to earn income. The ruling, reported by the Irish Times as part of a wider ASA complaints bulletin, puts TonyBet in company it probably does not want to keep. This is gambling news that stretches far wider than one operator and across multiple continents where regulators are slowly beginning to refuse to look the other way when gambling ads are misleading.

The Ads That Got TonyBet Into Trouble

The first ad showed a man on his phone while sitting on the toilet, with text reading “Only 3% of people can do this. Make money while sitting on the toilet.” The ASA ruled the phrase implied gambling was a dependable source of income and that such messaging posed a real risk of financial harm to viewers. The ad was ordered never to appear in its current form again.

The second ad featured a woman holding a baby. Text in the clip read “It's hard to pay my rent and take care of my babies,” before cutting to a thumbs-up alongside the claim that she had earned $8,500 the previous month. Regulators determined that both ads encouraged the belief that gambling could fix personal financial difficulties. which is a clear breach of Irish advertising standards.

TonyBet pulled both ads immediately. The company attributed the problem to a mobile affiliation partner whose new employee uploaded the material without running it through compliance checks. TonyBet says it was not warned the ads would go live on YouTube. Since the ruling, the company has increased its internal approval steps from two to five.

TonyBet Has Been Here Before: This is not an isolated incident. The Dutch gaming authority reprimanded TonyBet twice in the past year. The first was for failing to provide Dutch-language customer support, and again for listing betting markets on the Ballon d'Or, which regulators ruled could be manipulated because outcomes depend on jury votes rather than athlete performance. Three regulatory warnings across two countries in little over a year is a track record worth paying attention to.

The Wider Pattern Regulators Are Tired Of

TonyBet is far from the only operator to have landed in this territory. In the UK, ads tied to Lewis Hamilton, former footballer Gary Neville, and the Chelsea FC logo were pulled for breaching advertising guidelines. In the US, prediction market Kalshi faced legal complaints over social media ads that appeared to guarantee income. In fact, one clip implied that a user avoided missing rent by trading on the platform. The parallels with TonyBet's banned Irish content are hard to miss.

Ireland's advertising code is clear that gambling marketing must not portray the activity as a route to income or as a way to resolve financial hardship. The ASA upheld 15 cases in its latest bulletin. TonyBet appeared alongside a beauty brand that falsely marketed products as “Irish made” and an insurer that overstated cancer treatment coverage. In that company, TonyBet's ads stand out as the most potentially harmful in nature, even without any deliberate intention behind them.

A Note on Our Coverage: We have not joined or played at TonyBet, and that matters. At Casinoplusbonus, our casino evaluations are reserved for operators we have experienced firsthand — tested with real accounts and real money. You can see those assessments directly through our Casinoplusbonus casino reviews. TonyBet does not currently feature there.

Casinoplusbonus Opinion

If you are gambling in Ireland, this ruling matters to you. These ads were crafted to make gambling look like employment. That is not what it is, and the ASA was right to step in. For TonyBet, this was avoidable reputational damage. On the other hand, the company acted swiftly and has since tightened its approval process. Whether you play at TonyBet or anywhere else, you deserve advertising that is straight with you about the risks and not one that dresses up chance as a career move.