GME3: iGO-ing 3 for 3, Finfluenced Without Disclosure & Bot and Paid For

For this week’s GME3, we’re looking at iGaming Ontario’s numbers in its third full operating year, an Alberta-based “finfluencer” who is being sanctioned for failing to disclose paid promotions to his followers, and controversy surrounding a team of researchers who secretly deployed AI bots on Reddit to influence discussions on the platform, without users’ knowledge or consent. Read the full stories below! 

Gambling

iGO-ing 3 for 3

Ontario’s regulated iGaming market continues its strong upward trajectory in its third full year of operation. According to iGaming Ontario (iGO), total wagers from April 2024 to March 2025 reached $82.7 billion, a 31% increase over the previous year. Gross gaming revenue (GGR) rose even more sharply, up 33.7% to $3.2 billion.

Online casino remains the dominant vertical, accounting for $69.6 billion in handle and $2.4 billion in revenue, both up over 30%. Sports betting also grew, with $11.4 billion in wagers (+17%) and $724 million in GGR (+23%). Poker remained a small but stable contributor with $1.7 billion in wagers and $66 million in revenue.

Ontario set new records across the board. Q4 alone hit a high of $22.9 billion in handle and $903 million in revenue. March 2025 saw $7.9 billion in total bets and $294.8 million in GGR, second only to January’s record.

Cumulatively, the first three years of Ontario’s iGaming market have produced over $7 billion in operator revenue and more than $1.4 billion in provincial tax revenue. Online casino games have contributed 73% of total GGR to date.

As of March 2025, the market supports 49 licensed operators running 84 active sites. However, challenges remain: 16.3% of surveyed Ontarians report gambling only on unregulated platforms, and 20% of those using regulated sites still bet elsewhere. Hopefully we’ll continue to see those numbers go down as iGO’s operations continue to scale across the province.

Media

Finfluenced Without Disclosure

As if they read our piece on “finfluencers” in last week’s GME3, the Alberta Securities Commission (ASC) has ruled that a Canmore-based social media personality, James Domenic Floreani – known online as “Jayconomics” – broke securities laws by failing to disclose paid promotions for four publicly traded Canadian companies. Between November 2020 and March 2022, Floreani received over $100,000 from Tenet Fintech Group, Gold Mountain Mining, Levitee Labs, and Sekur Private Data in exchange for promotional content on platforms including YouTube, X (formerly Twitter), and Patreon.

The ASC found that Floreani, despite lacking formal finance or investment credentials, made recommendations to his 50,000+ followers without disclosing that the posts were sponsored. Under Alberta’s Securities Act, such disclosure is legally required for anyone involved in investor relations to ensure transparency and help investors evaluate the credibility of information. The commission noted that followers appeared to act on Floreani’s advice, which further emphasized the significance of the violation.

Floreani told investigators he was unaware of the disclosure requirements, and while the ASC stated that ignorance of the law is not a defence, it may influence the severity of future sanctions. Floreani claims he ceased posting financial content in early 2022 after suffering personal financial losses, declining health, and online threats.

The ASC is now considering appropriate sanctions or cost-recovery measures in response to the violations.

Entertainment

Bot and Paid For

Reddit is considering legal action after a team of researchers from the University of Zurich secretly deployed AI bots to influence discussions on the platform, without users’ knowledge or consent. The experiment took place on the subreddit r/changemyview, which invites debate on controversial topics. The bots impersonated real people and posted over 1,000 comments to try to sway users’ opinions.

Reddit has since banned the accounts and called the study “improper and highly unethical.” Its chief legal officer, Ben Lee, said the research violated Reddit’s rules, as well as academic and human rights norms. The moderators of r/changemyview also condemned the experiment, filing an ethics complaint and urging the university not to publish the results, warning it would encourage future non-consensual experiments.

The university said its ethics committee would adopt stricter oversight and confirmed the researchers had voluntarily decided not to publish the findings. Though the study’s guidelines urged compliance with Reddit rules and encouraged transparency, researchers admitted to using AI to infer demographic details from user histories in order to tailor responses. They claimed their posts were reviewed by a human and included ethical safeguards, but critics argue the project crossed serious ethical boundaries and undermined trust in online communities.