Bellingham and Fernandes Used in Ads for Unlicensed Betting Operators
iGaming operators Nightwin and QH88 ended up at the centre of a high-profile story involving fake ambassador deals. According to The Guardian, the brands used the images of active professional footballers Jude Bellingham of Real Madrid and Bruno Fernandes of Manchester United to create the impression of official partnerships with the players.
In Bellingham’s case, Nightwin promoted a fake BBC article on Instagram. It claimed the footballer had launched his own betting app, Bellingham Bet. After clicking, users were taken to a landing page for a non-existent product: it featured a fake rating, download counter and the familiar packaging designed to look like a real launch. Traffic was then redirected to Nightwin’s website — an operator that, according to The Guardian, was operating in Britain without a licence from the local regulator.
QH88 took a different approach. The operator, targeting the Vietnamese market, posted a video on its homepage showing Bruno Fernandes supposedly signing an ambassador contract with the brand at Old Trafford. The problem was that there was no deal. An expert from the Norwegian publication Josimar pointed to signs of AI generation: blurred details, visual inconsistencies and oddities in individual frames. Josimar itself described the case as the first known instance in which an AI avatar of a footballer was used to imitate an ambassador contract.
The story looks especially severe because of the players’ status. These are not former footballers, who are often used in betting brand campaigns, but active stars at top clubs. In that context, fake advertising works on two levels at once: it uses trust in a famous athlete and creates a sense of legitimacy around operators with which the players actually have no connection.
The Bellingham ad disappeared after a few days. The deepfake involving Fernandes, according to The Guardian’s report, was still on QH88’s website at the time of publication. This is no longer just grey-area marketing with other people’s photos and club logos. Here, unlicensed operators have effectively begun faking partnerships that never existed.
For the market, this is an unpleasant signal. If similar sites previously limited themselves to aggressive banners and questionable landing pages, now fake media, fake apps and AI videos with active footballers are being used. Users see a familiar face, a stadium and a “news” format — and do not always realize that they are looking not at an advertising campaign, but at a carefully assembled fake.
Mark Patterson is the news writer at CasinosInCanada who covers the latest developments in the iGaming industry, including casino launches, regulations, and market updates.
