NHS Health Site Hijacked to Push Illegal Casinos to UK Players
A website belonging to My Therappy, a health app originally built for stroke patients, has been found hosting adverts for offshore casinos that don’t hold a UK licence and don’t participate in GamStop, the national self-exclusion scheme. The discovery, reported on 4 September, is the latest in a growing list of UK institutional and public-sector sites that have been quietly taken over to funnel visitors towards the gambling black market.
What’s actually changed
The promotion of illegal casinos on UK-based public sector-facing websites has continued, with an NHS health app site seemingly being hacked to promote these platforms.
My Therappy’s website, which does not look to have had an official news update since October 2020, appears to have been hijacked by the promotion of non-UK and non-GAMSTOP casinos.
Its site is currently infested by these promotions, with an author named ‘Daniel Reeves’ showcasing the sites.
The same byline has turned up elsewhere promoting offshore gambling content, suggesting an organised affiliate operation rather than a one-off prank.
This isn’t an isolated case.
Back in June, the Old Catton Parish Council was caught up in a similar incident, after unknowingly displaying an advertisement for an Indonesian online slots casino.
In August, a Scottish government-linked website was found displaying similar rogue adverts, and researchers consulted by the BBC noted that
hijacking specific domains can often be a strategy to target certain groups of people, most likely local communities who would see illegal gambling websites appearing to be recommended from within their own area.
Wider research backs up the pattern. Analysis commissioned by the Betting and Gaming Council
found that the most common use of this technique was related to ‘not on GamStop casinos’, with affiliates having taken over sites including an archive on learning disability and autism policy and a Devon tourist information page.
The
most high-profile incident involved a previously used domain of Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party, which greeted visitors as a source for non-GAMSTOP casino guidance.
What it means for you
If you’ve self-excluded through GamStop, these hijacked sites are designed specifically to find you. Because the domains once belonged to trusted organisations, ordinary web searches or old bookmarks can lead you straight past your self-exclusion and onto a casino with no UK licence, no age verification obligations, and none of the deposit limits, affordability checks or dispute-resolution routes that licensed operators must offer. If a promoted casino sits outside GamStop or lacks a UK Gambling Commission licence number, treat it as unregulated: there’s no statutory protection if something goes wrong, and no route to the Commission or an ADR provider if you have a complaint.
The practical advice remains the same as with any suspicious link: check for a UK licence number on the operator’s site, be wary of adverts that appear on outdated or unrelated pages, and report anything that looks like this to the Gambling Commission.
The bigger picture
These incidents sit alongside a wider, well-documented struggle to keep GamStop’s self-exclusion promise intact.
These are continuous incidents of the proliferation of unlicensed UK gambling firms, which continue to prey on the most vulnerable consumers who have already self-excluded via GamStop.
The Gambling Commission’s outgoing executive director Tim Miller has repeatedly pressed technology platforms to do more, arguing that if regulators and researchers can find these ads, tech firms should be able to as well.
As
the Gambling Commission, the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, and the newly-formed Illegal Gambling Taskforce continue to face a substantial task in clamping down on the black market, one which needs tackling imminently.
Each fresh case of a hijacked NHS, council or political-party website adds pressure on that taskforce to show it can move faster than the affiliates exploiting these dormant pages.
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