Italy's antitrust regulator fined 'Big Luca' €60,000 for ads that didn't look like ads

Luca De Stefani, known online as 'Big Luca', built a large Italian social media following posting about quick, easy income from trading and side hustles, monetizing it with paid promotions for courses and financial products. Italy's competition authority AGCM opened an investigation in July 2024 into a group of Italian content creators over how those promotions were presented.

AGCM's finding, published June 13, 2025, was that the promotional content ran without any clear label marking it as advertising, and that some of the promised returns were unverifiable — sold as personal recommendations from a trusted creator rather than paid marketing. The authority closed the year-long probe with fines totalling €65,000: €60,000 for De Stefani and €5,000 for fellow influencer Michele Leka, while four related investigations into other creators closed with formal commitments instead of fines.

The case became one of the highest-profile applications of Italy's hidden-advertising rules to individual influencers, following the broader scrutiny AGCM had already brought on Chiara Ferragni's pandoro promotion — evidence that the regulator was treating undisclosed sponsorship as a standing enforcement priority rather than a one-off case.