Google search results flooded with hacked sites promoting illegal ones
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5 Sep 2025 •
Reading time: 3 minutes Can we still trust Google to find a legal casino in Belgium? Nothing could be further from the truth. When checking the legitimacy of a casino on Google, the results are revealing. Of the first 20 search results, only three sites are legitimate, while all the others are sites hacked to display illegal sites.
Is Googling a casino for reliability a good idea? Not really anymore! Until now, a good habit before playing on an online site was to check on Google whether the site was legal. The answer was quickly found in the results, thanks in particular to reputable affiliate sites promoting the country’s legal casinos. Little by little, sites hacked to display illegal casinos appeared. At first, they were a relatively discreet part of the search results. But now they have invaded the search results.
17 out of 20 sites are hacked
For the search term “legal 888 casino in Belgium“, the result is clear. Of the 10 sites displayed on the first page, only two are legitimate and reliable in Belgium: the Gaming Commission and Gambling Club. The rest of the results are composed entirely of hacked sites displaying top casinos that are completely illegal in Belgium.
The disaster continues on page 2. Among the sites displayed, we once again find Gambling Club and the Jeu Argent site, an affiliate site that lists only legal casinos. All the other sites are once again hacked sites, filled with “top 100% legal casinos in Belgium” but displaying only illegal sites.
The worst part? These hacked sites rank higher than trusted sites.
Gransino, SpinMama, etc.
Until now, hacked sites generally displayed a blue and purple page that we’re familiar with at Gambling Club and promoted the Gransino casino, which is illegal in Belgium.
This is no longer the case. Hackers are now going further and displaying entire top rankings filled solely with illegal casinos. All sorts of sites are affected: school sites, e-commerce sites, small business sites, lawyer sites, etc. Some sites aren’t even Belgian but still display top rankings of illegal casinos still accessible from Belgium.
And what about other search engines?
Curious, we took our investigations further and searched for the same keywords on other search engines to see if the problem was the same.
On Bing, there were no problems to report; all the sites listed are trusted sites in Belgium that only list 100% legal casinos. The hacked sites we saw on Google don’t even appear in the last few pages of results.
On ecosia, the search engine that plants trees, the results are mixed. Trusted sites rank high, but some of the hacked sites also appear lower in the results.
Duckduckgo, on the other hand, provides quality results like Bing. Even when searching further, no hacked sites appear in the results.
How do you know if a gambling site is legal in Belgium?
These search results show that we can no longer really trust Google to provide reliable answers. Here are some tips to ensure you only gamble on legal sites.
- Change your search habits: use another search engine like Bing or DuckDuckGo, which seem to do a better job of filtering out hacked sites. You can also go directly to a trusted site like Gambling Club, which only lists legal sites.
- Adopt the Gaming Commission reflex: before playing on a site, always check that it has a valid license in Belgium. This is easily done by consulting the list of licenses issued by the CJH.
- Check the URL: Another tip is to make sure the URL ends in .be. This isn’t a guarantee of being on a legal site, but all legal casinos in Belgium have a .be address. If the site you’re on ends with .com or any other extension, you can already be sure that it isn’t legal in our country.