A supermarket aisle is built on familiarity: the logo, the colours, the promise that what you see is what you get. Online, that same familiarity is increasingly being turned into a weapon.
Tesco has reported a fake online casino using its name and branding to the City of London police, becoming the latest major British brand caught in a growing wave of deceptive gambling promotions. The operation allegedly presented itself as the “official Tesco casino”, despite having no licence to offer gambling services in Great Britain.
The deception goes far beyond Tesco.
Banks, athletes and major commercial brands have also found themselves dragged into the same digital fraud. Barclays branding appeared in advertisements for a supposed casino featuring an apparently AI-generated woman and the image of Formula One driver Lewis Hamilton. Monzo has likewise been impersonated in online gambling promotions.
Neither bank has endorsed these operations.
The manipulation is particularly powerful because the scammers are not simply selling gambling. They are selling borrowed trust.
A familiar corporate logo can make an unfamiliar website appear legitimate. A famous athlete can make an advertisement feel authentic. A well-known supermarket can create the illusion that a gambling service has the backing of a household name.
That illusion is precisely what regulators and companies are now confronting.
Lewis Hamilton and Tyson Fury are among the sports personalities whose identities have been used without permission in connection with rogue gambling operations. Jude Bellingham and Bruno Fernandes have previously faced similar misuse. Another cryptocurrency casino promoted through Meta used an apparent lookalike of Manchester City and Norway striker Erling Haaland, dressed in a Norway shirt.
The problem is not confined to celebrities. Legitimate gambling brands, including Coral and Gala Bingo, have also been impersonated by unlicensed operators.
Entain executive Bejay Patel described the practice as an exploitation of both consumers and legitimate businesses, arguing that illegal operators can avoid British taxes and licensing requirements while technology platforms continue to carry their advertisements.
Meta said it removed the advertisements identified by the Guardian following inquiries. Yet the wider problem exposes a difficult gap in responsibility: platforms can host the advertising, scammers can create the material, and regulators can attempt to chase the websites — while consumers are left to determine what is real.
The Gambling Commission has warned that using the identity of trusted companies to direct people towards unlicensed casinos is an especially cynical form of illegal gambling activity. The regulator says it is pursuing UK-targeting sites and expects stronger powers from the autumn under new legislation.
But the sheer adaptability of these operations makes enforcement difficult.
Several websites examined in the investigation claimed to hold licences from Curaçao, a jurisdiction widely associated with online gambling. A licence elsewhere, however, does not give an operator permission to provide gambling services illegally to consumers in Britain.
The fake Tesco operation reportedly went as far as creating a Facebook page and describing its casino as being built on the supermarket’s long-established reputation. That is the heart of the scam: the product being advertised may be gambling, but the real commodity is credibility.
And artificial intelligence is making that credibility easier to manufacture.
Synthetic faces, celebrity lookalikes, manipulated branding and convincing advertisements can now be produced rapidly enough to overwhelm traditional checks. What once required an elaborate forgery can increasingly be assembled with software and distributed through enormous social-media networks.
The danger therefore extends beyond gambling.
If criminals can make a fake casino look like Tesco, Barclays or Monzo — and make a fictional endorsement appear to come from a global sports star — the deeper question is no longer simply whether an advertisement is genuine.
It is whether consumers can still trust what they recognise.
In the digital economy, a famous logo used to be a shortcut to authenticity. Increasingly, it can become the bait.
