Tesco casino scam ads circulating on Facebook and Instagram have prompted the supermarket to alert City of London police, throwing fresh light on a wave of fake casino promotions that regulators have struggled to contain. Tesco joins Barclays, Monzo, Coral, Gala Bingo and a roster of sports stars in having its brand conscripted by offshore operators who have no legal right to serve British customers.
A Fake ‘Official Casino’ Built on a Trusted Name
The mechanics are brazen. A website still accessible in the UK presents itself as “the official Tesco casino”, boasting that its slot games are “laid out as clearly as the aisles at a Tesco Extra” and trading on what it calls “the trust of Tesco, a FTSE 100 company with 107 years of UK trading history since 1919”. The site holds no UK gambling licence, which is a legal requirement to operate here.
A Facebook page for the fake casino remained live until questions were sent to Meta. Tesco declined to comment publicly but referred the matter to the National Cyber Security Centre and the Report Fraud service run by City of London police. A police spokesperson confirmed receipt of the complaint, adding that it had not yet been referred for investigation.
Barclays found its branding paired with Lewis Hamilton’s face in a since-deleted Facebook ad for “Barclays Slots” that featured an apparently AI-generated woman in a sexually explicit pose playing a fake Barclays casino game. Barclays said it “does not endorse or have any involvement” with the material. Monzo called its own impersonation “an AI-enabled scam where criminals take advantage of our much-loved brand to trick people”.
Among the operators identified is Rainbet, a cryptocurrency casino whose own terms and conditions confirm it is owned by Rain Group Ltd, registered in Anjouan, Union of Comoros, under company registration number 16077. The site uses what appears to be a lookalike of Manchester City striker Erling Haaland as a casino croupier, wearing a Norway shirt. It was advertised via Meta. Rainbet is not accessible to UK users, but the advertising reached British platforms regardless.
Anjouan licences have become a familiar fixture in this corner of the internet. Curacao, another offshore jurisdiction frequently cited by these sites, functions similarly: licences there do not authorise operators to serve customers in regulated markets such as the UK. Any site offering gambling services to British consumers without a Gambling Commission licence is breaking the law. Under the Gambling Act 2005, the maximum penalties for such offences run to 51 weeks’ imprisonment and an unlimited fine, according to the Chambers and Partners Gaming Law 2025 UK guide.
Tesco Casino Scam Ads and the Question Meta Won’t Answer
The Gambling Commission’s enforcement director, Tim Miller, put the question directly at the ICE Barcelona trade show earlier this year. Speaking about Meta’s role, Miller said: ‘It does leave Meta with the question of “Whose side are you on? The consumer and users of your platforms, many of whom are seeking to escape gambling harm, or the criminals and con artists who are using your platforms to prey on vulnerable people right in front of your eyes.”‘
Miller had earlier accused Meta of ‘turning a blind eye’ to illegal gambling advertising, according to Reuters. Meta’s response was to say it enforces strict policies on gambling and gaming ads, has been working with the Gambling Commission to take down flagged content, and uses that intelligence to improve proactive detection tools.
Those policies, set out on Meta’s own ad transparency page, require advertisers seeking to run gambling promotions to request authorisation through Meta Business Suite and provide evidence that their gambling activities are appropriately licensed in the territory they wish to target. Meta also prohibits targeting users under 18. The gap between the policy as written and the ads that appear in practice is, to put it politely, wide.
Bejay Patel, managing director of UK and Ireland at Entain, which owns Coral and Gala Bingo, framed it as an industry-wide failure: 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”. He called on Ofcom to “take a harder line on the companies facilitating this activity”.
The Gambling Commission regulates a £15.6 billion gross gambling yield industry. It has the motivation to act. What it has lacked, until now, is the reach. From autumn, the Crime and Policing Bill is expected to give the Commission new powers to apply to a court for orders blocking access to IP addresses and domain names linked to unlicensed gambling sites, as confirmed on the Commission’s own enforcement pages. That is when we will find out whether the law has teeth, or whether the Anjouan croupiers simply redirect.
