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Socialite and influencer Millie Elder-Holmes, who last year became the first person in New Zealand to pay a $5000 fine for promoting overseas gambling, is facing a new fine – which she intends to fight in court.
The Department of Internal Affairs began cracking down on ads in April 2025,sending letters to four then-unnamed influencers warning them that promoting foreign gambling sites on New Zealand-based social media posts violates the Gambling Act.
“In spite of this, she continued,” the director of gambling regulatory services for Internal Affairs, Vicki Scott, told the Herald last year.
She was among four influencers – including Head Hunters member Calen Morris, the cousin of her murdered longtime partner, Connor Morris – who were issued another round of fines in September.
Millie Elder-Holmes
This time, though, she has sought a court date to fight it. The case was called for the first time this week in Auckland District Court. A follow-up hearing has been set down for April.
The Department of Internal Affairs has accused her of violating Section 16 of the Gambling Act two times on August 27 – one count for her Instagram account and another for her Facebook page.
The law bars most advertising about overseas gambling aside from a few exceptions: health messages about problem gambling, business-to-business ads targeted at gambling equipment buyers, and posts in which “the publicising or promotion of gambling or a gambling operator is incidental to the purpose of the advertisement”.
The fine is $5000 per incident when issued as an infringement. The Department of Internal Affairs also has the option of requesting it be heard in the district court, at which point a judge can order a fine of up to $10,000 per charge.
Millie Elder-Holmes
In this case, however, it will be heard in the district court not at the gambling regulator’s request but so the infringement can be challenged. The fines were posted to Elder-Holmes’ Waiheke home in September.
Charging documents indicate the alleged illegal ads promoted Leon Casino, which operates out of Belize in Central America.
Scott told the Herald in September that the agency preferred issuing fines instead of district court charges because it gets resolved faster and “doesn’t clog up the court system”.
“The $5000 doesn’t seem like a lot but it can very quickly rack up if influencers continue to post,” she said.
Millie Elder Holmes and he social media platforms.
“If we are not getting traction that way and influencers continue to break the law, then we can work with the social media platforms and request they either deactivate their accounts or geo-lock New Zealanders from following them.”
In addition to the four New Zealand influencers issued fines in September, the agency also issued 12 infringements totalling $60,000 to Spinbet, an online casino based in the Caribbean.
Craig Kapitan is an Auckland-based journalist covering courts and justice. He joined the Herald in 2021 and has reported on courts since 2002 in three newsrooms in the US and New Zealand.
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