Newcastle United’s new Asian betting partner 8Xbet almost entirely vanished late in 2024, only to reappear with a mysterious new “owner” shortly afterwards. It is now embroiled in an unprecedented trademark war with a mysterious US company in the UK and elsewhere. What is going on?
By Philippe Auclair, with additional reporting by Jack Kerr, Sam Kunti and Steve Menary
Illegal sports betting operators take extra care not to do anything which might expose their structure and the identity of their owners; but, at the same time, they must protect their businesses and their all-important brands in a chaotic industry where impersonation and brand counterfeiting are rife. The question is how to do this without revealing what and who they are, which means, for example, not getting law enforcement agencies involved and keeping out of court to settle disputes.
There is one exception to this rule: English football’s favourite sponsor 8Xbet, a unique brand in more ways than one. Josimar has catalogued no fewer than ten complaints filed by the owners of the brand with the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) since September 2023. All ten cases were decided in their favour. No other illegal gambling operator has ever adopted such a – risky – strategy or adhered to it so rigorously.
And now, in March 2026, 8Xbet is embroiled in a new turf war, this time with an American company which may or may not be linked to one of 8Xbet’s main competitors in its key market, Vietnam. But this strange tale can only be told properly if the scene is set properly first, which means leaving the Far East for a while and heading for the Caribbean.
Curaçao, the hub
By 2022, the year 8Xbet’s name first appeared in public, the small island of Curaçao, a stone’s throw away from the coast of Venezuela, had established itself as one of the world’s main offshore gambling jurisdictions. Its licensing system, in which four “Master Licence Holders” were given the exclusive right to sell sub-licences to all and sundry with minimal oversight from the local regulator, the Curaçao Gaming Control Board (GCB), was ideally suited, some would even say tailored, to cater for the needs of shady operators. These operators flocked there in their hundreds. 8Xbet, registered as a brand belonging to a company called 978 Tech N.V., also incorporated in Curaçao, was one of them.
It did not matter that licences obtained in Curaçao did not enable the companies which held them to do business legally anywhere in the world, not even on the island itself, which made it a condition for would-be licensees not to operate there. Those licences were not entirely “worthless” for that. The GCB seal which its licensees never failed to display on their websites could fool credulous punters into believing that they were dealing with legitimate, properly regulated entities – which they were not, not at the time anyway. More importantly, a licence, any licence, would enable access to the global banking system via financial institutions (many of them located in the Caribbean) which did not look too closely at their customers’ credentials. The “licence” box was ticked, that was good enough.
However, the systematic abuse of Curaçao’s licensing system by illegal operators led to the island acquiring a damning reputation as a global money-laundering hub. Things came to a head in the second half of 2024. Allegations of corruption were directed at important figures on the island’s political scene, including Finance Minister Javier Silvania. BC[.]GAME, Leicester City FC’s principal sponsor then as now, was one of the operators who came under scrutiny following a class action by gamblers whose winnings had not been paid. As Josimar revealed, the company operating the brand was about to be declared bankrupt when it decided to leave the jurisdiction.
In parallel, the Dutch authorities – Curaçao, a self-governing former Dutch colony, remains part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands – increased their pressure on the local authorities to overhaul their licensing system, with success. In 2025, a new legislation, known as LOK, replaced the old Master Licence system with a direct licensing process. This triggered an exodus. Many operators followed BC[.]GAME’s lead and headed for offshore jurisdictions where what passed as “regulation” was even lighter than in Curaçao, with the Indian Ocean island Anjouan seeing a huge influx of new licensees in particular.
Wayback Machine-generated screenshot of 8Xbet[.]com in late 2024, showing that the website was non-operational at the time.
It was around that time, in the autumn and early winter of 2024, that 8Xbet all but vanished. Its websites either ceased being operational or were now leading to dead-ends. Curaçao-based 978 Tech N.V. morphed into Aplus Limited, a company incorporated in the offshore haven of the Republic of the Marshall Islands. All the while, 8Xbet’s name and logo kept being flashed on the LED hoardings of Premier League grounds, a name and logo which its “new” owners seemed intent to defend with unusual alacrity and vigour.
Trademark blitz
It was then, in late 2024 and throughout 2025, that, as shown in the United Nations WIPO database, the brand’s name and logo were trademarked in multiple jurisdictions, such as Peru, Australia, Brazil, South Korea, Japan, Germany and the European Union – where 8Xbet did not hold a licence and could not operate legally
Unusually, WIPO lists three different “owners” of the 8Xbet trademark – “owners” who should not be confused with the actual proprietors of the company, whose identity remains unknown, including from the clubs who do business with them.
Even more unusually, one of these “owners” was found to have misappropriated the 8Xbet brand trademark by WIPO’s own court.
Judging by documents filed with the US Patent & Trademark Office (USPTO), those rights were assigned for a compensation of 1 USD in the United States, the transaction becoming effective on 1 January 2025, at a time when the 8Xbet[.]com website was all but dead. As shown below, the same individual, “Ryan Li”, never pictured but often identified as the company’s CEO or “founder” in press releases and club statements (including Newcastle United’s), was the signatory of the transfer agreement for both 978 Tech N.V. and Aplus Limited, suggesting that what happened here was only a change of name and corporate domiciliation.
Excerpt from the Trademark Assignment Agreement passed between 978 Tech N.V. and Aplus Limited filed in the United States.
Aplus now acts as the Registrant of the 8Xbet trademark and as its guard dog in intellectual property disputes, of which there have been a surprising number ever since the operator’s name appeared for the first time, in the early days of 2022.
See you in court
In August 2025, Aplus filed a complaint against a man named as “Duc Tam Tram” in US documents. Duc is the owner of TCM Technology LLC, an American company incorporated in the state of Iowa in July 2025. Aplus accused him of abusing the 8Xbet trademark by operating a website, “8Xbetvina[.]com”, which made liberal use of the company’s name and logo. Vietnamese Intellectual Property Office records show that Duc Tam Tram, apparently a Ho Chi Minh Ville resident, had also filed three registration requests to trademark alternative logos for 8Xbet in his own name in Vietnam itself, which remain pending at the time of writing.
The transcript of the WIPO judgement makes for fascinating reading. On one hand, the Complainant, 8Xbet, via Aplus, claims to be “the largest gambling website in Asia” without presenting evidence of this assertion. On the other, the respondent, TCM Technology, accused of fraudulently appropriating 8Xbet’s name and logo, bases part of its defence on the fact that “the Complainant does not have a valid gambling license to operate in Vietnam and thus operates illegally in that jurisdiction”; which is correct. There is an added farcical side to the case: its sole adjudicator, Vincent Denoyelle, whom Josimar contacted, was not able to access the disputed domain name, “as it triggered a security warning message”.
Nevertheless, Duc Tam Tran and TCM Technology were found guilty and the property of 8Xbetvina[.]com was transferred to the Complainant, Aplus.
End of story? Not quite. In 2025, guilty as they may be in the eyes of WIPO, TCM Technology have still been able to trademark 8Xbet in Germany and to have a registration request processed in the UK, the only country in which 8Xbet advertises its brand in nine football grounds, an all-time record for an illegal sports betting operator. Aplus, who had also registered 8Xbet with the British Intellectual Property Office in 2024, did oppose TCM’s move, but a decision on the case is still pending. What on earth is going on here? Is TCM a cuckoo in 8Xbet’s nest?
The OKVIP family
TCM Technology shares its corporate address, 6701 Corporate Drive, Johnston, Iowa, with hundreds of other companies. For most of these, it is only a letterbox, as this single-storey “data centre” (as this how it was advertised when recently sold) could only accommodate a fraction of them.
TCM Technology LLC HQ in Johnston, Iowa.
TCM’s trademark particulars as they appear in the WIPO database as of 5 March 2026.
But TCM Technology is not a ghost ship, even if they do not appear to have their own website and if Josimar was unable to find any contact details for them. They have a purpose.
They register trademarks of illegal Asian-facing casinos and sports betting operators.
These include, apart from 8Xbet, former sponsor of Sevilla and Osasuna KUBET, the current Asian gambling partner of AS Roma Hi88 and 789BET, formerly championed by Luis Suarez and part of the OKVIP “family” of brands, whose current partners include the Argentinian Football Federation AFA and La Liga club Villareal.
One thing all of these brands have in common, 8Xbet included, is that they prioritise the Thai and Vietnamese markets, rather than mainland China, Malaysia and Indonesia. That their trademarks were all filed for registration by the same entity within the space of less than six months between August 2025 and January 2026 also suggests that mere coincidence is not the only factor at work here.
One thing is sure: OKVIP is one of the biggest illegal gambling operations in the Far East, a huge operation with resources to match. It could be that whoever runs this “family” of brands, noticing how 8Xbet had virtually disappeared as an active presence, decided to step into the breach and reclaim a well-known name and logo in two territories at least, one of which happens to be the home of Newcastle United and the Premier League.
It could also be that TCM is playing with OKVIP’s “family” of brands the same game it played with Aplus – the cuckoo in the nest, which is very hard to dislodge if it was first to move in. This is becoming a common practice in the chaotic world of Asian-facing sports betting. To take but one other example, another company based in the Marshall Islands, Aldgate Keeley Limited, is currently trying to register OKVIP brands, as well as brands of heavyweight operators M88 and SBOBET…in Vietnam.
Sports betting brands for which Aldgate Keeley is trying to register ownership of a trademark, as shown on the WIPO database, 5 March 2026.
Maybe Newcastle United could shed some light on this matter. Josimar encouraged them to, but has received no response so far.
(*) Josimar uses “illegal sports betting” as defined by article 3 of the Macolin Convention: “any sports betting activity whose type or operator is not permitted under the applicable law of the jurisdiction where the consumer is located”.
(*) Teddy Sheringham was announced as their “long-term global ambassador” in January of that year, which was also when their Twitter/X account (on which nothing has been posted since January 2023) was created and when 8Xbet[.]com was first recorded on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.
(*) TRẦN ĐỨC TÂM is the correct spelling in Vietnamese.
(*) This “TCM Technology LLC” should not be confused with the “TCM Technology Group LLC”, a legitimate IT services firm which has been operating for three decades in the New York area.
(*)Aplus Limited filed and won another trademark case at WIPO, this time against Cambodian national Chan Soluch, who was found guilty of brand misappropriation in October 2025.
(*) Bournemouth, Chelsea, Crystal Palace, Leeds United, Newcastle United, Nottingham Forest, Sunderland and Leeds United of the Premier League, plus Ipswich Town and Leicester City of the Championship.
This article is the second part of a Josimar investigation into illegal sports betting operator 8Xbet and its relationship with English football clubs. The first part can be read here.
