Unlicensed casino operators have spent the past year buying Facebook and Instagram advertisements that borrow other companies’ names and other people’s faces, then pointing the resulting traffic at websites that hold no gambling licence. Tesco is the newest complainant: the supermarket group has reported a fake “Tesco casino” to the National Cyber Security Centre and to Report Fraud, the reporting service run by City of London police, which confirmed it received the complaint but has not yet referred it to a police force for investigation.
The mechanism is not subtle, and it is cheap. Someone registers a domain, builds a site presenting itself as “the official Tesco casino”, buys ad inventory, and waits for people who trust the logo. The site the Guardian reviewed claims its slots are “laid out as clearly as the aisles at a Tesco Extra”, and that the casino is “built on the trust of Tesco, a FTSE 100 company with 107 years of UK trading history since 1919”. It holds no licence from the Gambling Commission, a requirement for offering gambling to customers in Britain. The same site is still reachable from the UK.
Brand trust as the product
Tesco is one name on a longer list. Barclays branding has been used in promotional material built around Lewis Hamilton’s face; one now-removed Facebook ad for “Barclays Slots” showed an apparently AI-generated woman who pulled down her trousers and turned around to reveal she was playing a Barclays casino game. Monzo’s imagery has appeared in ads for fake “Monzo slots”. Coral and Gala Bingo, both owned by Entain, have been impersonated. The boxer Tyson Fury filmed an Instagram video for his followers disavowing an online casino bearing his name, saying he had turned down “millions” offered by gambling companies.
Footballers are the same business model with a different face. Jude Bellingham and Bruno Fernandes have previously had their images used without consent by an unlicensed betting operator; the crypto casino Rainbet, which claims an Anjouan licence, uses an apparent lookalike of Erling Haaland dressed as a croupier in a Norway shirt. The Guardian has approached representatives of Haaland and Hamilton for comment.
Several of the sites analysed claim licensing in Curacao, a jurisdiction known for issuing gambling licences to operators that hold none in major markets. For a British customer, that distinction is the whole story: a Curacao licence is not a UK licence, and using an unlicensed operator means no route to the UK complaints framework, no assurance about how deposits are held, and no UK tax paid on the money.
The regulator’s remit stops short
The Gambling Commission said using a trusted brand’s identity to funnel people towards unlicensed casino products is “a particularly cynical version” of illegal gambling activity, and that it will gain more powers to take down unlicensed sites targeting UK consumers from the autumn, under the crime and policing bill. The unauthorised use of intellectual property sits outside its remit; it is working with the Advertising Standards Authority, which is aware of the problem but has had little success containing the volume of ads.
Meta’s position, reported by the Guardian, is that it removed the ads after the paper’s inquiries, and that it considers advertisers — not platforms — responsible for complying with local regulations. The commission has previously criticised Meta’s record on unlicensed casinos.
One quote in the piece comes from a party with two interests in the outcome. Bejay Patel, Entain’s managing director for UK and Ireland, said any casino masquerading as a licensed operator was “exploiting British consumers and legitimate businesses alike and paying no taxes, while some of the world’s largest technology platforms continue to profit from hosting their adverts,” and called on Ofcom to take a harder line. Entain owns Coral and Gala Bingo, so it is both an impersonation victim and a licensed competitor to the operators running the ads. That does not make the description wrong; it does mean the enforcement ask is an industry one.
What the Guardian’s reporting establishes is the mechanics: brand recognition rented from someone else, distributed through the same ad systems that legitimate operators use, aimed at customers who reasonably assume a household name implies a licence. What it does not provide is a measure of the damage — no figures on deposits lost or customers affected. The sites do keep working, and the complaint Tesco filed is, so far, unassigned.