Tesco Calls Police as Fake Casino Ads Expose Meta’s Illegal-Gambling Problem

A website presenting itself as an official Tesco casino was still accessible from Britain this weekend, despite having no Gambling Commission licence and no connection to the supermarket whose identity it had borrowed.

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The operation had gone considerably further than putting a Tesco logo on a gambling site. Facebook advertisements promoted the casino, which also maintained its own page on the social network. The website leaned heavily on Tesco’s history and reputation, even comparing the organisation of its slot games with the layout of the supermarket’s larger stores.

Tesco has now referred the matter to the National Cyber Security Centre and Report Fraud, the fraud-reporting service run by City of London Police. Police confirmed receiving the complaint but, as of Sunday, it had not been passed to a force for a formal investigation.

The Facebook material disappeared after the Guardian contacted Meta.

What remains is a much larger problem than one counterfeit casino.

Banks, bookmakers and footballers pulled into casino scams

The Tesco operation is part of a collection of unlicensed gambling businesses appropriating some of Britain’s most recognisable corporate and sporting identities. Barclays and Monzo branding has appeared in casino promotions. Coral and Gala Bingo, both legitimate gambling brands owned by Entain, have been impersonated too.

Sports stars have become another source of manufactured credibility. Lewis Hamilton’s image appeared alongside Barclays-themed gambling material. Tyson Fury discovered an online casino trading on his identity and publicly disowned it. Jude Bellingham and Bruno Fernandes have previously been used without permission by rogue gambling operators.

One operation took a different route. Rainbet, a cryptocurrency casino claiming a licence from Anjouan, used what appeared to be an Erling Haaland lookalike dressed in a Norway shirt and acting as a casino dealer. Rainbet itself was unavailable to users in Britain, but its advertising appeared on Meta’s platforms.

There is no indication that any of those athletes endorsed the casinos.

Some of the advertising also bears the increasingly familiar fingerprints of synthetic media. One now-removed Facebook promotion for a supposed Barclays gambling product featured an apparently AI-generated woman in sexually suggestive material before showing a casino game on a phone.

Barclays rejected any association with the campaign and took steps to protect customers and its intellectual property. Monzo characterised the misuse of its identity as an AI-assisted scam intended to exploit consumer confidence in the bank.

Borrowed trust is the business model

The attraction of these brands is not difficult to understand.

An unknown offshore casino has a credibility problem when it asks someone in Britain to deposit money. Tesco, Barclays and Monzo do not. Nor do Premier League footballers, Formula One champions and heavyweight boxers. Borrowing those identities allows an operator to manufacture familiarity before a prospective customer has examined who actually owns the casino or where it is regulated.

The result is a peculiar kind of illegal gambling funnel: trusted British identity at the front, offshore or opaque gambling infrastructure behind it.

Meta sits between the two.

The company removed advertisements identified by the Guardian after being contacted about them. Its position, as understood by the newspaper, is that advertisers rather than the platform are responsible for complying with local regulation.

That distinction leaves unanswered how advertisements for gambling businesses without permission to operate in Britain reached Meta’s advertising system in the first place.

Meta’s advertising controls face a basic test

For the UK industry, that matters well beyond trademark protection. Licensed operators spend heavily on compliance, taxation and advertising controls. An offshore casino masquerading as a familiar British gambling company can avoid those costs while competing for the same customers.

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Entain, which owns Coral and Gala Bingo, has attacked that imbalance. Its UK and Ireland managing director, Bejay Patel, has argued that impersonating casinos harm both consumers and legitimate operators while avoiding tax, with large technology platforms benefiting financially from carrying their advertising. He has called for tougher intervention from Ofcom.

Regulators already know the phenomenon exists.

Both the Gambling Commission and Advertising Standards Authority are aware of the spread of these advertisements, but the campaigns have continued. The Gambling Commission has also previously criticised Meta over advertising for unlicensed gambling businesses.

The regulator can pursue sites offering gambling illegally to consumers in Great Britain, although unauthorised use of corporate intellectual property falls outside its remit. It is working with the ASA and expects additional powers from the autumn through the crime and policing bill, which it believes will strengthen its ability to disrupt illegal gambling websites.

Offshore licences do not solve the UK problem

Several sites examined in the Guardian investigation claimed licences from Curaçao. Others, including Rainbet, cited Anjouan. An overseas licence does not permit a casino to offer remote gambling to consumers in Great Britain without the required British authorisation.

The Tesco and Tyson Fury-branded operations appeared to be aimed at British customers. Attempts to establish who was behind them through the contact information on their sites went nowhere. The Tesco casino’s contact link did not function. The equivalent route on the Fury-branded site led only to a page carrying a cryptic three-word message.

That opacity shifts attention towards the businesses around the casinos.

A functioning online gambling operation needs more than a disposable domain and some stolen branding. There are hosting services, advertising accounts, gambling software and, crucially, mechanisms for moving players’ money. Those relationships could provide a clearer route towards identifying the operators than the names displayed on the sites themselves.

The purported offshore licences are another obvious point of inquiry. Establishing whether the Curaçao and Anjouan credentials are genuine, misused or invented would begin to separate offshore operators exploiting regulatory differences from outright fraudulent casino fronts.

The unanswered questions go beyond the ads

There are similarly specific questions for Meta. How were the gambling advertisers verified? What documentation was supplied when they bought advertisements? Were their gambling licences checked against the countries they targeted? How much did they spend, and how many British Facebook and Instagram users were reached before the campaigns were removed?

The Gambling Commission has another set to answer: whether it has identified the people behind the Tesco and other impersonation sites, and whether it knows which hosting companies, payment processors and gambling suppliers support them.

Tesco’s police complaint has turned one particularly brazen impersonation into a potential law-enforcement matter. But taking down a Facebook advertisement or counterfeit Tesco page deals only with what consumers can see.

The more important machinery — who bought the advertising, who accepted the deposits, who supplied the casino and who ultimately received the money — is still largely hidden.

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Source: theguardian.com