Former fraudster highlights ease of access to unlicensed gambling in the UK
Alex Wood placed bets using absurd fake identities during Cheltenham Festival week.
UK.- Alex Wood, a former fraudster who spent eight years in prison after more than 25 years engaged in scams, has conducted an investigation into unlicensed gaming for Flutter Entertainment. The findings have heightened concerns about practices within the unlicensed gambling sector.
Wood now works as an anti-fraud consultant and CEO of Reform Courses, a fraud-awareness training provider. During Cheltenham Festival week in the UK, he demonstrated how easy it was to place bets on sites not authorised in the UK by registering under a series of false identities. As part of his research, which was featured on BBC Radio 4’s Scam Secrets, Wood opened an account with the unlicensed operator VeloBet using the personal details of trainer Willie Mullins and then bet on races involving Mullins’ horses.
Other examples included signing up with Santeda International-owned platforms using identities such as the nine-year-old racehorse Constitution Hill and the fictional character Little Bo Peep. In one case, a live chat agent wished one of his aliases a happy birthday after he claimed he was about to turn 18, despite the fact that his registration details indicated that he was underage.
Wood also found that some operators allowed him to gamble despite being registered with GAMSTOP, the UK’s self-exclusion scheme.
Presenting the findings at Deal Me Out’s Illegal Gambling Prevention Conference, Wood warned that illegal platforms were becoming “completely indistinguishable” from licensed ones. He noted the use of merchant category codes (MCCs) to avoid banks detecting that transactions were linked to gambling, saying that this allowed payments to bypass banks’ gambling block tools.
He found that some apps listed in app stores were promoted as “adventure games” or “puzzle games,” but featured real-money gambling. He also claimed that platforms like Instagram facilitate illegal betting, allowing influencers to promote it, and that AI-powered chatbots were also directing people to unlicensed gambling sites.
As for possible solutions, Wood suggested that targeting payment service providers could be effective, but that the use of cryptocurrency made this more difficult, with some unlicensed gambling sites providing detailed instructions for crypto transactions. He suggested that more could be done to
put pressure on the market and make people aware of the issue.
