A mobile app bearing the name and logo of Fifa’s new “prediction market partner” ADI Predictstreet has finally landed in the Google Play store. What it leads to is an illegal online casino.
By Philippe Auclair, Martin Calladine and Sam Kunti
This is the fifth part of Josimar’s investigation into Fifa’s partnership with Predictstreet. The first part reported that the company’s founder paid a six-figure sum to settle accusations of insider trading. The second part revealed Predictstreet’s new CEO’s ties to Qatargate, one of the biggest lobbying scandals in EU history. The third part detailed how, in 2018, Predictstreet’s head of anti-money laundering (AML) accepted a two-year ban on financial activity in Gibraltar after overseeing AML failings at a former employer. The fourth part reported how ADI Predictstreet received its Gibraltar gambling licence a mere nine days after the company was founded, and that one of its directors works for a law firm of which the Minister who issued that licence is a partner.
Thirty-six days have passed since 9 April, when Fifa’s new prediction partner ADI Predictstreet was officially set to launch. Yet visitors to their website are still greeted by the same, unchanging landing page: “COMING SOON”, when there are only twenty-five days to go before the 2026 World Cup kicks off at the Azteca Stadium, and rival prediction markets such as Polymarket and Kalshi have already attracted billions of dollars of bets on the tournament. ADI Predictstreet’s social media channels have been promoting its latest development: a branded Discord channel, something that takes a matter of hours to set up and, as yet, contains no details of when the product will be functional. Time is running out.
However, there was a semblance of movement last week, when Josimar noticed that it was possible to download an “ADI Predictstreet” app from the Google Play app store (*), though it came with the bizarre description “reserve culinary hardware Adi approved by the predictstreet consumer index” and was listed under “Shopping”.
Josimar took a deep breath, downloaded, installed and opened the app. As expected, it did not take us to a functional ADI Predictstreet page; nor did it offer us a range of “ADI-approved” pots and pans. It took us to the landing page of a casino called “Spinkings”.
According to the terms and conditions of the mobile app, which read like they were cut and pasted from a variety of similar documents, Spinkings is licensed in Curaçao and offers casino games and sports betting to customers based in the UK, though, strangely, the currency referred to most often in those T&Cs is the euro. There is no trace of a “Spinkings” in the current Curaçao registry of gaming licensees or on the database of the Great Britain Gambling Commission.
The Hijacking
The Spinkings casino is real, however. Websites bearing the recognisable crown-and-shades-wearing king logo show up at the top of internet searches (which suggests significant time and effort has been spent to maximise search engine optimisation) and are freely accessible from a variety of locations, including the United Kingdom. Yet Spinkings is not functional. Registering on the platform is impossible. Most links are broken or missing. This goes for the numerous Spinkings mirror sites Josimar tried to register on, from a variety of locations, all of which show the same landing page. It is obvious that the “real” ADI Predictreet has been hijacked and its logo and brand name are exploited by a third party whose ultimate motives are unclear. But how could this be allowed to happen? How could a rogue, unlicensed casino get away with registering an “ADI Predictstreet” app on the Google Play store?
What is Spinkings?
It is difficult to ascertain who exactly is behind Spinkings. Emails sent by Josimar to the two “contact” addresses mentioned on the casino’s homepage both bounced. The company which registered the app in the Google Play store, ZHIWW Ltd, is British, but its UK “address” is a PO Box. Its sole director is a 25-year old Chinese national called Zhiwei Wu, who has yet to confirm his identity with Companies House, details which do not inspire the greatest degree of confidence in the legitimacy of the operation.
Looking deeper, a “Spinkings” associated with the characteristic logo of the casino shows up in the WIPO database of international trademarks.
The owner of the Spinkings trademark is a company called Amuzetcom Services Ltd (*) – “Amuzetcom” is “Moctezuma” spelled backwards -, which is incorporated in the tax haven of St Vincent & The Grenadines and is associated with three other gambling operators, Top Casino, SarayBet and ZoraBet, all of which are unlicensed and have hijacked the URLs of other businesses and institutions in order to maximise their performances in internet searches, ZoraBet in particular. A pattern of fraudulent impersonation appears to be at work here.
Defenceless
The question then is: how can a company like ADI Predictstreet, which is said to have spent 150 million USD for the privilege of becoming Fifa’s official “prediction market partner”, become a victim of this type of identity hijacking? How is it possible for an entity for which security must be paramount and has been designed by some of the finest minds in tech to fall prey to such a crude trick?
The speed with which the ADI Predictstreet project has been put together by its controversial founder Ajay Hans Raj Bhatia and his colourful team is breathtaking. Josimar readers will remember how it took the Gibraltar Minister for Justice, Trade and Industry Nigel Feetham KC a mere nine days to issue a licence to the operator. But speed and haste are not the same thing and, in this case, ADI Predictstreet seems to have jumped the gun and left themselves open to hostile moves such as Spinkings’. Quite extraordinarily, neither the brand names “Predictstreet” and “ADI Predictstreet” appear to have been trademarked; nor is there any sign of the company’s logo in the WIPO database. No matches could be found.
This means that ADI Predictreet has no obvious legal recourse against the hijacking of their identity by a fraudulent third party which, in this case, can argue that no trademark or copyright law has been broken. Why a company which aims to reach a global audience and make a name for itself in a global market should not have taken this elementary precaution is hard to fathom.
Still, it is reassuring to know that, as senior Fifa officials told Josimar, when it comes to ADI Predictstreet, “all was done by the book”.
ADI Predictstreet and Fifa Media did not respond to Josimar’s questions.
(*) No “ADI Predictstreet” app is available on the Apple store.
