How UK gambling safeguards fail to defend online punters

When Everton FC’s players ran out to face bitter Merseyside rivals Liverpool last month, their shirts were emblazoned, courtesy of a £10m-a-year sponsorship deal, with the name Stake.com.

Until recently an obscure online betting firm, Stake.com, which specialises in controversial cryptocurrency gambling, has followed traditional bookmakers in hitching itself to the world’s most popular game. And football was a keen recipient of new sponsorship revenues.

Stake has splashed plenty of cash elsewhere, too. A partnership with platinum-selling Canadian rapper Drake means his fans can watch live video streams of him gambling millions of dollars at a time. Stake has also spent big on sponsorship deals with Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) and Formula One driver Pietro Fittipaldi.

Stake’s low-profile 27-year-old co-founder, Ed Craven, has been equally lavish, spending a combined £70m on two mansions in the wealthy Toorak suburb of Melbourne, Australia, where Stake.com and its parent company, EasyGo, are based.

These extravagances are funded by the firm’s huge annual revenue, but in theory none of it should be coming from customers gambling with digital currency in the US and UK, where this is effectively banned.

However, an investigation by the Observer has found that Stake.com’s lucrative and fast-growing empire may be benefiting from lax controls on customers – including under-18s – betting with crypto.

Last month, the Observer asked Stake.com whether UK punters might be using virtual private networks (VPNs) – widely available digital tools that create a spoof location for a computer – to bypass country restrictions on crypto gambling. Stake.com said it had implemented “stringent compliance processes” to prevent this. But