A Parish Council in Norwich was left shocked after discovering that an Indonesian gambling website had hijacked its website.
Old Catton Parish Council’s website usually features the latest updates from meetings and forms to hire the local village hall.
However, earlier this month, the site was instead promoting an overseas gambling website using the image of a scantily clad woman playing slots on its homepage. The council’s contact page was also replaced by one in Indonesian that referred to online slot games.
A spokeswoman for the council told the Local Democracy Reporting Service that it quickly rectified the issue and investigations were ongoing to ascertain how the site’s security was breached.
Though an unusual case, targeting obscure websites has become a recognisable tactic of the black market.
Research conducted by Alvarez & Marsal and commissioned by the Betting and Gaming Council (BGC) said that black market operators are bypassing marketing filters used by search engines and social media by assuming names and brands associated with trusted organisations.
In particular, the BGC noted that the most common use of this technique was related to ‘not on GamStop casinos’.
A search for ‘not on GamStop’ at the time found that affiliates had taken over websites such as an archive for the Independent Review of Learning Disability and Autism in the Scottish Mental Health Act and a tourist information page for the North Devon town of Bideford.
The most high-profile incident of this occurring featured a previously used domain of Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party, now rebranded as Reform UK.
Upon entry to thebrexitparty.org website, visitors were welcomed to a ‘dedicated source for discovering and understanding the world of non-GAMSTOP casinos for UK players’.
These instances underscore the challenge facing those battling the black market, as the Gambling Commission’s Executive Director, Tim Miller, emphasised in a recent episode of the iGaming Daily podcast.
He said: “You can find them, that’s not the issue. The issue is being able to take them, especially when they’re based in other jurisdictions, and particularly in jurisdictions where there is no law enforcement cooperation. For a criminal network based in Russia, our ability to drag them into the magistrates’ courts is going to be almost zero.”
