Tesco has alerted City of London police after it became the latest in a string of companies and sports stars, including Barclays bank and Lewis Hamilton, to have its image hijacked in a “scam” by unlicensed casinos advertising via Facebook and Instagram. The supermarket chain is among several household-name businesses to have been targeted in an apparent effort by casinos that cannot legally operate in Britain to capitalise on their brand recognition. Their branding has featured in ads and websites, promoted via the US social media company Meta, that gave the false impression that the businesses had launched their own casinos.
Sports stars including Lewis Hamilton and Tyson Fury have also had their faces used without consent, while one offshore casino used a lookalike of the footballer Erling Haaland wearing a Norway shirt. England’s Jude Bellingham and the Manchester United player Bruno Fernandes have also previously had their images used without consent by rogue gambling firms. Both the Gambling Commission and the Advertising Standards Authority are aware of the problem, but appear to have had little success in preventing the spread of the ads.
A fake “Tesco casino” was advertised on Facebook and even had its own page on the platform until the Guardian sent questions to the social media site’s owner, Meta. The ads were linked to a website, which is still accessible in the UK, that claims to be “the official Tesco casino”. The site boasts that its slot machine games are “laid out as clearly as the aisles at a Tesco Extra” and claims that its casino is “built on the trust of Tesco, a FTSE 100 company with 107 years of UK trading history since 1919”.
However, it does not have a licence to provide gambling services in Great Britain, a legal requirement to operate. Tesco declined to comment but the supermarket chain referred its concerns to the National Cyber Security Centre and Report Fraud service, run by City of London police. A spokesperson for City of London police said it had received the complaint but had not yet referred it to a police force for investigation “at this time”.
Barclays’ branding has been co-opted in promotional material that features the face of Lewis Hamilton. In one Facebook advert for “Barclays Slots”, now taken down, an apparently AI-generated woman had her trousers pulled down to expose her buttocks. She then turned round to reveal that she was playing a Barclays casino game on her phone.
Barclays said it “does not endorse or have any involvement” with the material, and took appropriate action to protect customers from misleading use of its intellectual property. Other ads that featured on Facebook and Instagram promoted fake casinos including Monzo slots, using the online bank’s imagery. Monzo said this was an “AI-enabled scam where criminals take advantage of our much-loved brand to trick people”, and urged its customers to be alert to such material.
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