The Long family are facing up to their second Christmas without their eldest son.

Last year, an eight-year cycle of gambling addiction, recovery and relapse came to an end when Ollie took his own life, aged 36.

Gambling addiction had taken a devastating toll on a young man remembered as kind and quick-witted, with bright career prospects and a loving family. It left Ollie terrified of his future.

Now, a picture has begun to emerge of why, try as he might, he could not shake the affliction that had dogged him for so long.

Like hundreds of thousands of British gamblers, Ollie Long had stumbled into the grip of an international offshore network that exploits people who are already struggling to control their habit.

This elaborate edifice appears designed to profit from problem gamblers who want to be blocked from betting and have signed up with GamStop, the UK’s gambling self-exclusion scheme.

GamStop allows customers to bar themselves from all forms of legal and licensed online betting and gaming by registering with the service. More than half-a-million people have signed up so far, in many cases with life-changing positive results.

But some of its good work risks being undone by the growing prominence of search terms such as “Not on GamStop” or “Non GamStop casinos”, which can appeal to vulnerable people tempted by the dangerous world of unlicensed, offshore gambling.

So far, the British authorities, including the Gambling Commission, appear all but powerless to stem the tide, while precious little is known about who sits behind them, pocketing the profits.

But bank statements provided by Ollie’s family – together with a trail of online evidence – are beginning to provide clues about the mechanics of this phenomenon.

Bet in play

Ollie’s addiction began conventionally enough, when his love of football – and Liverpool FC in particular – led him to take up a bookmaker’s “sign-up” offer.

Football has risen to become Britain’s biggest betting sport, fuelled by the rise of rapid-fire “in play” wagers on minor outcomes such as the next goal scorer or the number of corners.

Last year, punters wagered almost £10bn on football games, delivering £1.3bn in takings for gambling companies, nearly twice what they made from horse racing.

Ollie’s sister Chloe believes the game he loved has effectively been “hijacked by the gambling industry and used as a powerful vehicle for addiction and profit”.

The cause of Ollie’s death will be determined at an inquest due to be heard in January.

But the Longs know that an addiction to football betting loomed large.

As with many people who go on to develop a gambling problem, Ollie had a big early win, according to his family, scooping about £15,000.

But soon, according to one of the handwritten notes that Ollie habitually wrote to document his struggles, things “started to fall apart”.

He began depositing thousands of pounds, chiefly with Bet365, the online gambling empire owned by the billionaire Denise Coates. In June 2017 alone, he fed £3,000 into his account with the Stoke-based company. There is no suggestion of any failure to follow gambling licensing rules by the company.

As his mental health deteriorated – and he turned to drug use, in his words, to “numb the pain of gambling” – Ollie’s job as a business analyst and his relationship with his partner began to suffer. He lost both in the same year. Soon, Ollie was turning to payday loans to fund his gambling. He would end up borrowing more than £22,000 from his parents to repay debt racked up with punishing interest rates.

And yet, there was hope, including a period of nearly a year in which bank statements suggest he managed to stop gambling altogether. In 2022, he signed up with Gamban, an app that helps block betting sites on mobile devices. He also began working for a charity that helps other people with a gambling problem. Perhaps most importantly, he registered for GamStop.

Not on GamStop

Founded in 2018, GamStop is Britain’s safety net for those who want to lock themselves out of online gambling. Customers can sign up to “self-exclude” from all licensed UK operators for between six months and five years. GamStop shares that data with licensed operators, who can then lock the customer out of all forms of gambling.

Despite initial teething problems, the system has improved over the years and more than half-a-million people are now registered.

But as GamStop has grown, a grim trend has emerged, of “affiliate” websites that specialise in directing customers to the “best” online casinos and bookmakers that are not covered by it.

Affiliate websites typically take a cut of the profits, or a one-off fee, from each click-through to such casinos.

These websites are not on GamStop because they hold licences not in the UK but in offshore jurisdictions such as Curaçao, the Caribbean island that is a haven for gambling companies, meaning that they appear to be offering their services illegally.

That means that there is little to no regulatory risk for them if they take wagers from vulnerable people and addicts.

Yet any cursory search on Google for “Not on GamStop” brings up endless lists of such sites, names such as MyStake, Goldenbet, Donbet and Velobet.

Yield Sec, a data analytics company that has investigated offshore gambling sites, believes that more than 84% of illegal gambling content in Britain stems from Not on GamStop, driving an increase in the illicit market’s takings from UK punters from £122m in 2022 to £583m last year.

Yield Sec’s founder, Ismail Vali, believes that the success of this search term indicates that companies may be tailoring their services to people likely to have a gambling problem.

“They came into the UK marketplace to make money from the most vulnerable at-risk communities,” Vali says. “[Gamblers] were being hunted.”

Google has the ability to reduce the prominence of search results that are deemed risky and is understood to be examining the Not on GamStop search term.

Ollie’s family have suffered the tragic consequences of a business model that Chloe describes as “morally incomprehensible”.

She believes he was caught by a web of offshore casinos that are “abusive and malicious, exploiting people at their most vulnerable for their own financial gain”.

“It is morally incomprehensible to intentionally push someone in recovery back into the addiction they are desperately trying to escape,” she adds.

The money trail

When Ollie’s family began piecing together his final months, they paid particular attention to his bank statements.

At first, these showed dozens of transactions with the usual companies, such as Bet365, SkyBet and Betfred.

Later, after Ollie registered with GamStop, the names became more obscure.

During the final month of his life, Ollie made 55 transactions, sending about £5,000 to a clutch of recipients with similar names, such as MadsWinterEU, MadsWinterCom and Wintermads.com.

Little information exists online about Wintermads.com and the website appears to be defunct. A Scandinavian financial technology magazine refers to a company of that name as being involved in the sale of non-fungible tokens (NFTs), controversial digital artworks that have been linked to investment scams. An email to someone apparently connected with the company went unanswered.

Wintermads appears to be connected to at least one offshore casino operator that does not have a licence to offer gambling services in the UK. Earlier this year, a customer of Lloyds Bank complained to the Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS) about their experience of using an online casino called Donbet, one of the biggest hidden market players in the UK.

The customer had won money, he claimed, but the website had not paid out.

The ombudsman ruled against the customer, determining that Donbet “appears to be a legitimate business” and that Lloyds was not at fault for allowing the customer to transact with it.

The FOS’s report had echoes of the paper trail left behind by Ollie Long. It listed 15 payments to a recipient called WinterMDSE, a similar name to the companies that took Ollie’s money in his final weeks.

Like many illicit sites operating in the UK, Donbet.com’s website says it is owned and operated by a company with a Curaçao licence, Santeda International. It takes payments via another business using the name Santeda, in Cyprus. A spokesperson who answered an email address published on Donbet.com claimed that this was not true.

According to one estimate, from a study by the illicit market analysis firm GAMRS, first reported by industry publication Next.io, the Santeda network takes £2bn in bets from the UK annually.

Public information about Santeda is patchy at best and a spokesperson for MyStake, one of the companies it operates, declined to provide details about its ownership. The spokesperson denied that Santeda targets self-excluded gamblers and said it had safer gambling tools in place.

The way forward

When Rachel Reeves announced an extra £1bn-a-year tax on licensed online gambling companies at last month’s budget, the response from the £12.5bn-a-year UK gambling industry was to warn that the illicit market would be the big winner.

The logic, they said, is that legitimate bookies would need to cut costs, by reining in their marketing and hacking back the “bonus” offers that punters look for. Illicit market operators, with no UK regulatory or tax obligations, would step in to hoover up the custom.

The Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), which vets the budget, appears to agree, to some extent. It forecasts that about £200m of overall gambling duty revenue could be forfeited by 2029-30 as a result of customers switching to offshore sites.

But so far at least, the Not on GamStop phenomenon appears to have little to do with tax.

Ismail Vali says Yield Sec’s work shows that the hidden market exists almost entirely to serve those who cannot gamble, whatever the duty levied on their bet might be, because they have self-excluded or because they are under 18.

As well as running Yield Sec, Vali is the president of Gaming Compliance International, which assists governments and regulators with compliance. He is concerned that the British authorities – and the Gambling Commission in particular – – have been “asleep at the wheel”.

He wants to see the platforms where Not on GamStop sites are advertised – such as in Google searches or on Facebook, held to account for allowing the flourishing of an online “ghetto”.

The government has responded to concerns by allocating £26m in funding over three years, to help the Gambling Commission battle illicit operators. This represents a huge increase on its current annual budget for this task, of just £1.5m.

According to figures on the Gambling Commission website, the regulator has stepped up its efforts. In the fourth quarter of 2025, it secured 214 removals of websites by search engines and social media platforms and blocked 180 sites in the UK.

Chloe remains to be convinced that the regulator’s current approach is working warning that illicit markets are “thriving”.

“Ollie’s death has shattered our family,” she says. “The government must act urgently to replace the current ineffective approach with an enforcement strategy genuinely committed to reducing the accessibility of black market sites and protecting those at risk.

“Anything less will cost more innocent lives.”

• In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on 988lifeline.org, or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counselor. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org