BBC Scotland found 16 community council links on the Scottish Borders Council website pointing at offshore gambling portals. The links have been taken down. The expired domains had not.
A local authority website is not where most people expect to land on a “top no GamStop casinos” pitch. That is what happened in the Scottish Borders.
BBC Scotland News reported that the Scottish Borders Council directory of 69 community councils included 16 website links that no longer led to village halls, minutes or contact emails. They led to offshore casino pages that sit outside UK gambling law. The council removed the links after the BBC flagged them. It did not comment.
The Gambling Experts is treating this as a consumer-protection story, not a curiosity. The mechanism is simple. The risk to self-excluded players is not.
What the BBC found
Scottish Borders Council lists every community council in the region, with social pages, emails and websites. Sixteen of those website URLs had been captured by gambling operators or affiliates.
Fifteen of the sixteen had lived on a third-sector directory called Online Borders. Community council sources told the BBC that platform went unresponsive about eight years ago. The council shut it down and told groups to build their own sites. The old addresses were left behind. Those domains now funnel to the same style of portal: rankings of casinos that market themselves as “no GamStop.”
The sixteenth case was different. Chirnside Community Council’s URL resolved to Joyslot88, an Indonesian-facing casino brand, rather than the shared Online Borders dump.
Dr Daniel Thomas, a cyber security researcher at the University of Strathclyde, described the pattern as domain squatting. Buying a lapsed name is legal. Using a trusted council link as a distribution channel is the point.
“When someone is looking for the community council and are met with this gambling portal they will think something is wrong and of course not engage with the site,” he told the BBC. Search traffic is another matter. A reused community council URL can still rank as if a local group were recommending offshore casinos.
Thomas said small community groups are regular targets because volunteers rotate, technical knowledge is thin, and domain renewals get dropped in the handover.
After the BBC approach, the council is understood to have sent a memo asking community councils to check that their sites are current. BBC Scotland could not reach the gambling-site operators. The council still had not issued a public comment when the original report was published on 21 August 2026.
Why “no GamStop” is the product being sold
The pages were not advertising the UK-licensed market. They were advertising sites that do not join GamStop, the national online self-exclusion scheme.
GamStop exists so a person who has chosen to lock themselves out of GB-licensed apps and websites is actually locked out. Offshore operators are not in that system. A self-excluded player who follows a leftover council link can open an account the licensed market would refuse. That is the consumer harm, and it is why this is more than an expired-DNS anecdote.
The same sites also sit outside other UK rules. The Gambling Commission banned remote gambling with credit cards in April 2020, after evidence that borrowed money increased harm. “No GamStop” brands routinely still take cards. They are not bound by UK advertising standards, dispute processes or affordability checks either. That is the trade-off described in our briefing on the state of non-GamStop casinos in the UK in 2026.
If you want the wider legal map, see legal status of casinos in the UK and other markets and legal gambling updates across Europe in 2026.
The 16 community councils named by the BBC
Berwickshire: Chirnside; Duns; Gordon and Westruther; Hutton and Paxton
Cheviot: Ancrum; Crailing, Eckford and Nisbet; Heiton and Roxburgh; Lanton; Oxnam Water; Sprouston
Eildon: Bowden; Newton and Eildon
Teviot and Liddesdale: Hobkirk; Southdean; Upper Liddesdale and Hermitage
Tweeddale: Carlops
(The BBC listing rendered the last Teviot name as “Hermita.” The community council is Upper Liddesdale and Hermitage.)
None of those groups is accused of promoting gambling. Their old addresses were allowed to expire or were left pointing at a dead platform. Someone else bought the names.
This is not an isolated council-website problem
Edinburgh had a similar scare earlier in 2026. A former Neighbourhood Partnerships site, still linked from edinburgh.gov.uk pages, had been reused to advertise casinos that claim to evade GamStop. The Local Democracy Reporting Service raised it. The council said it no longer owned the domain and began stripping residual links.
The pattern is the same: a public-sector URL dies, the lease is not watched, and the replacement content is an affiliate page for unlicensed casinos. Search engines and official directories keep passing trust to an address that no longer belongs to the institution.
What players should take from this
- A link on a council page is not a licence. Check the operator against the UK Gambling Commission register, not the referring website.
- If you are on GamStop, treat any “no GamStop” result as a bypass attempt. That is the product.
- Credit-card deposit options on a casino site are a practical warning that you have left the GB-licensed market.
- Expired community and charity domains will keep getting recycled. The fix is boring: renew names, redirect dead URLs, and audit outbound links.
Safer habits sit in our guides to how to gamble responsibly, platforms built around responsible gambling tools, and common mistakes in online gambling.
If gambling is causing harm, use GamStop, GamCare or BeGambleAware. Those tools only cover the licensed market. An offshore site that arrived via a lapsed .org.uk name is designed to sit outside them.
The Gambling Experts view
Domain squatting is legal. Using a forgotten community council URL as a shopfront for unlicensed casinos is a known affiliate tactic. The Scottish Borders case matters because the traffic source was an official local-government directory, not a banner on a review blog.
Scottish Borders Council did the minimum once the BBC called: it pulled the live links and told community groups to check their sites. That does not recover the expired domains, and it does not stop the same names ranking in search.
Public bodies that still publish directories of small volunteer groups should treat domain expiry as a safeguarding issue, in the same category as a broken safeguarding PDF. Players should treat any sudden “no GamStop” landing page as unlicensed until a UKGC licence number says otherwise.
Reporting based on BBC Scotland News by Thomas Martin, published 21 August 2026. The Gambling Experts has not independently inspected the live domains after the council takedown.