Celtic proudly promotes itself as a football club with a social consciousness. For nine years the club’s main sponsor has been a betting company breaking laws, defrauding customers and wrecking lives.
By Nathan Paul Southern and Lindsey Kennedy
Dafabet has featured on the shirts of Celtic FC since the gambling brand became the club’s main sponsor in 2016. The team is displayed prominently on Dafabet’s sites and social media pages, even as the company faces bans the world over for breaking laws, defrauding customers, and wrecking lives. The UK-facing Dafabet site is now also embroiled with a conglomerate that openly channels money into Russia – even to banks sanctioned for their roles financing the war on Ukraine, and to family members of Putin’s inner circle.
Celtic is hardly the only UK club to strike a deal with a dubious sponsor. But the Scottish team has pushed its charitable ideals ever since it was set up in 1888 to support Glasgow’s impoverished Irish Catholic community and its fans have long proudly spoken out in support of Palestine. Its nine-year association with Dafabet increasingly enrages supporters and risks hurting its image overseas at a time when revelations of sexual abuse at its youth club have also rocked its reputaton at home.
Celtic fans have been vocal in support of Palestine and are not afraid of showing it.
Dafabet was created by AsianLogic, a company set up in 2002 by three Hong Kongers. One, Tom Hall, was a key figure at Israeli-Estonian gambling tech giant Playtech from its early days and later a professional poker player. Hall is no stranger to controversy: in 1999, the Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission (SFC) prosecuted one of his investment companies for advertising “guaranteed” returns and in 2014, he was ordered to pay back 14 million pounds in legal costs and illicit profits skimmed from an investor who asked him to buy shares in British gambling giant Betfair.
His cofounders at AsianLogic were Chris Parker, a former British army officer turned Asian casino investor (and co-defendant in the SFC trial) who left in 2011 to set up a film production company (credits include Pamela Anderson biopic Pam & Tommy), and Chi Kan Tung, a Chinese accountant who cut his teeth working for billionaire Macau casino mogul Stanley Ho, and who is still listed as the company’s CEO.
Dafabet’s ownership structure is complex by design.
Smoke and mirrors
“Dafabet” was initially the UK trading name of an Isle of Man-based company, AsianBGE, which also held an offshore gambling license in the Philippines for the brand via Bayview Technologies. The site was supposedly managed by Emphasis Services Limited (ESL), incorporated in Turks & Caicos, whose Chinese-language, 2007-era website boasted offices across Asia and said it was working closely with Playtech to develop online casino games. The .com site claims to be operated by Curaçao-licensed gambling company Osmila N.V. Meanwhile, ESL registered Dafabet’s trademarks in the UK, Australia, the EU, Philippines, Israel, Hong Kong and Laos (where online gambling is illegal), but Maltese company Eurasia Solutions P.LC, which holds a gambling licence in Spain, registered its trademarks for Brazil. Yet another company, Asian Betting and Gaming Enterprises Africa Limited (Asian Betting), holds the trademark for Kenya and operates as Dafabet there.
This is all smoke and mirrors. Other than Playtech, these companies are all owned or controlled by AsianLogic Limited (a.k.a the ALL Group), and most list the same office address on their websites and corporate filings: a skyscraper in the Makati area of Philippines capital city Manila that was, until recently, dominated by offshore gambling operators. Tom Hall stated in 2014 that Dafabet is one of the company’s main brands.
Online gambling is illegal or heavily restricted in most Asian countries, but these are huge potential markets for online sportsbook and casino companies. A common tactic to bypass advertising bans is sponsoring a sport that is widely broadcasted in the target country, exposing viewers to the site name on shirts, stadiums, and promotional materials.
Chris Kronow Rasmussen, director of Financial Crime Prevention at the advisory group Advisense, says there is no requirement for clubs to know who their sponsors are or where the money came from. “The lack of regulatory checks for sponsorship deals creates an environment where organised crime can enter without much scrutiny,” he says, leaving them “vulnerable to accepting funds from high-risk or criminally associated entities.”
The only check, explains Rasmussen, is usually whether the club believes a sponsor might harm its reputation. “Clubs typically don’t have legal obligations to investigate a sponsor’s background beyond a basic assessment of public image,” he says, and criminal organisations see UK and European football leagues as a “soft touch”.
Dafabet’s longest relationship has been with Celtic, but it also struck deals with English teams like Aston Villa, Everton and Bournemouth, and this year expanded into English cricket – which, as, Steve Menary wrote in The Nightwatchman, helps it reach viewers in India and its neighbours, who appear to be the most engaged spectators online. India is a major target for Dafabet and Playtech, who rolled out a suite of exclusive online casino products together in 2020.
Dafabet claims to Asia’s mumber one online betting site. Their customers do not agree.
Unhappy customers
Since then, Dafabet’s reputation has imploded. On its homepage, the company claims to be Asia’s most secure betting site, but on the review site TrustPilot, it has an average score of 1.2 out 5, with most reviewers claiming they were conned. Many describe having accounts closed as soon as they won money, or told their balance had been frozen and forced to endlessly resubmit documents that had already been accepted.
“Dafabet is a scam,” says one. “Never play on Dafabet. Your deposit will be added instantly but you will never get your withdrawal,” warns another. “This platform used to be good, but nowadays they have become greedy and keep looting players… Playtech is fooling and scamming players,” says another.
Indian law enforcement agrees. Last year, it listed Dafabet among 27 fraudulent company websites to be unilaterally blocked, and in January, police arrested a man in Telangana state whom they charged with masterminding a giant fraud scheme in “collaboration with the organisers” of Dafabet. His accomplices, they said, operated from Hong Kong, Dubai, the Philippines, and China.
The government banned Dafabet from operating in India in 2023 and accuses its owners of exploiting a regulatory loophole by using a surrogate website called Dafanews to redirect site visitors to the gambling platform, where they were preyed on by fraudulent betting schemes. (Despite this, Dafanews also landed major sponsorship deals with Indian super league football clubs Mumbai City F.C., Punjab F.C. and Mohammedan Sporting Club for the 2024-2025 season.)
Some users have been financially ruined. In July 2024, a 24-year-old man in Lakshettipet lost over 14,000 pounds to one of Dafabet’s alleged fraud schemes, and at least one suicide has been attributed to scams on the site.
No license, no problem?
It’s unclear where Dafabet.com is operating legally. Last May, the Philippines Cagayan Economic Zone Authority, which oversaw Bayview Technologies and Dafabet in its early years, said the company’s licence was cancelled way back in 2018, and urged people to stay vigilant to avoid being scammed. A month later, the Philippines gambling regulator issued a warning that Dafabet was operating illegally using a fake certificate generated on a fraudulent site. The regulator also downgraded Bayview’s accreditation to “provisional” sometime in 2023. Dafabet’s site links to a license in Curaçao that ran out on 28 November 2024, and its customer support directs to a “Malaysia affiliate”, even though online gambling is illegal there.
In July 2024, the Philippines issued a presidential decree banning online gambling operators. This was an attempt to contain the overwhelming rise in kidnappings, human trafficking, financial scams and corruption linked to organised crime groups hiding behind regulated providers. This passed into law on 1 January 2025, meaning any operators remaining behind are now categorically illegal.
Over the past year, AsianLogic and AsianBGE rebranded as a Malta-based collective of companies called SportServe. This lists Dafabet and NextBet, another site trademarked by ESL, as core brands, while aggressively recruiting for staff in a swathe of locations. This includes India, Serbia, Greece, Poland, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Georgia – and especially Armenia.
Job ads posted in online gambling and scam recruitment channels on Telegram indicate that Armenia is a major hotspot for clandestine betting companies and scams, especially those that recruit and target Indian nationals. Police have conducted multiple raids since 2019.
We were unable to establish whether Dafabet’s workforce has shifted to Armenia, but the company is linked to a major Armenian gambling giant.
Until recently, Dafabet’s UK-facing site said it was operated by Malta-based gambling provider SCGO and licensed in the UK under the trading name VBet. (The co.uk site stopped loading sometime in 2025, but SCGO is still listed as its “white label” operator on the UK Gambling Commission’s database). This made VBet Dafabet’s licence holder and its sister site. It’s also a huge gambling brand of its own, striking high-profile sponsorships with everyone from AS Monaco to the Ukrainian national team.
VBet has a chequered past. In 2023, the UK Gambling Commission fined it 337,631 pounds for failing to prevent money laundering through the site. In 2020, Malta’s Financial Intelligence Analysis Unit issued its biggest ever fine of 733,160 euro (610,506 pounds) to Vivaro, a former brand name used by VBet, for breaking 10 different laws.
Brothers in Armenia
This is the tip of the iceberg. VBet’s owners, the Armenian brothers Vigen and Vahe Badalyan, control a global corporate empire with highly questionable links to Russia. They also have the ear of senior political figures in Armenia and Malta.
Vahe (left) and Vigen Badalayan.
When their flagship company, SoftConstruct, opened its Armenian office in 2017, the prime minister attended the ceremony. In 2021, Vigen Badalyan was filmed partying on the Greek island of Mykonos with the politician who led a casino bill that eliminated much of Vivaro’s competition, leading to speculation that the luxury vacation was a reward (the minister refused to say whether Badalyan funded the trip). In December 2023, the Armenian government published photos of the deputy prime minister touring the facilities of companies owned by the Badalyan brothers, and in June 2024, a Maltese government delegation did the same.
In 2016, the year Sportserve says it was founded in Malta, the brothers acquired Maltese citizenship. Corporate documents from 2020 state the brothers own business centres, a cybersports brand, a jewellery company, a cryptocurrency trading platform (Fastex) based on their own coin (FastToken), the Vivaro Group, the white-labelling online gambling companies Radon and Betconstruct – which says it holds gambling licences in the UK – and several companies under the SoftConstruct (S.C.) brand. In Malta, SoftConstruct and SCGO Limited are registered to the same address. Leaked documents in the Panama Papers show a snippet of the brothers’ web of offshore companies. They also have businesses in the UK and Isle of Man.
“We pulled together a team with a common goal of conquering the world,” said Fastex CEO Vakhtang Abrahamyan, in an interview in Dubai in July.
Google Maps and photos uploaded at the site suggest the SoftConstruct HQ is home to several companies owned by the Badalyans: SoftConstruct, VBet (Dafabet’s UK licence-holder), Vivaro, BetConstruct, Fast Bank – and Fast Shift, an online payment platform.
Fast Shift is also registered in the UK with Vigen Badalyan as the sole shareholder. Its website explains that the app lets users pay bills and transfer money directly into other bank accounts. That includes Russian state-owned VTB Bank, which is under international financial sanctions for helping to finance the invasion of Ukraine.
The UK announced these sanctions in February 2022, shutting down VTB’s UK branch and freezing its assets.
A mock-up of the FastShift payment app showing an option to pay directly to VTB.
Violating these sanctions is punishable by a minimum fine of 1 million pounds and up to seven years in prison. Every other UK-linked payment platform we reviewed says they suspended all payments to Russian accounts.
The Russian offensive
But Fast Shift makes little attempt to hide its VTB links or its willingness to move money into Russia. The app’s description on the Google Store – linked from its UK site and updated in November 2024 – announced that they are “excited to introduce the new Transfers to Russian Banks cards feature,” although this wording was removed in the last update in October 2025.
FastShift also allows direct payments to Russian online gambling platform Fonbet – dropped as sponsor of Real Madrid, AC Milan and PSG after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine – and dozens of gaming sites belonging to companies accused of funnelling money to Russia: VK Group, My.Games, and Xsolla.
VK is owned by US-sanctioned Gazprom, whose CEO – the son of Putin’s deputy chief of staff Sergei Keriyenko – took over the year after his father was placed under targeted sanctions by the European Union. My.Games came under fire for allegedly helping Russians evade sanctions by using one of its products, a donation app, to collect money for Russian soldiers. Xsolla is an American-headquartered firm that said it would shut down its Russian parent company in 2022 but admitted in November 2023 – after Ukrainian politicians called for a boycott – that it still operates there.
Dafabet’s sister site, VBet, also has links to Russia, hosting its Russian Poker Tour until at least 2021. In April, Ukrainian authorities reportedly froze VBet accounts worth 11 million pounds to prevent this being diverted to Russia.
Most organisations accepting hundreds of millions of pounds from an overseas entity would be expected to make sure they aren’t implicated in crime. Not so in football – and it’s unlikely to change soon.
“While we currently have no plans to introduce an independent regulator into Scottish football, we are aware of proposals in England to do so and will watch with interest as this develops,” said a Scottish government spokesperson.
Some countries have already introduced bans on gambling advertising, obliging clubs like Celtic to switch to shirts with different sponsors when playing away matches in Italy or Spain. But these rules are far from universal. Until then, it’s up to clubs to protect global fans by vetting sponsors who trade on their reputation and reach. With the global football sponsorship industry valued at around 30 billion pounds – and when organised crime syndicates linked to the worst horrific practices have the deepest pockets – they have little incentive to take that step.
The British Gambling Commission said they “don’t have anyone available to discuss” the issues raised in this article. Celtic FC and Dafabet did not respond to our requests for comment.
