Gambling Club Research: Illegal Gambling Sites abuse high school website
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6 Sep 2024 •
Reading time: 2 minutes Research by the investigative journalists of Gambling Club has exposed one of the practices of illegal casinos. For example, it appears that some websites of public schools were hacked and automatically link to affiliates that promote illegal casinos.
“It is shocking that a website was used for this that is so intertwined with minors.” – Ron, investigative journalist.
For example, a URL of Sint-Jozef Humaniora, a school in Bruges, appeared in the search results. The extension “actuele-casino-nieuws-uit-belgië/” was added under the school’s domain, which created a link to the website of an illegal casino provider called Monixbet. This type of manipulation raises many concerns, because it undermines the credibility of search engines and misleads consumers.
Director of Sint-Jozef unaware of illegal use
After an investigation by Gambling Club, Diederik Maes, director of Sint-Jozef Humaniora, was contacted. Maes was unaware that his school’s URL was being misused by an illegal casino website. “We were not aware of this. I will have our IT department investigate immediately how this could have happened,” said Maes.
This is not the only case; several reputable websites appear to have been hacked to promote illegal gambling sites. This is a criminal offence and raises questions about the security of online domains.
Not an isolated case
Illegal casinos and affiliate sites appear to have found a bad way to bring Belgian consumers into contact with online casinos that are not permitted. In this way, existing websites are hacked without their knowledge.
When players and other interested parties are looking for legal online casinos in Belgium, they are often confronted with illegal providers in Google’s search results. Many of these websites appear to be affiliate sites or illegal casinos that have bought up old, reputable URLs. Or even hacked existing websites.
Whereby the accumulated value of the websites is abused to offer gambling services. This problem causes confusion among consumers and exposes a major problem in the way search results are displayed.
The research results were passed on to the Gaming Commission and the results will be shared later.