On Wednesday morning we published the latest piece of work from our new Investigations Unit. The project revealed that Irish authorities granted gambling licences to six companies at the centre of a global network of black-market betting and casino websites. We found that two Irish companies were processing payments for unlicensed gambling sites operating in Europe. And, more broadly, that the company at the heart of the investigation – the global betting giant Soft2bet – and its related entities made €600 million from dozens of offshore casinos that regulators in Europe had blacklisted or fined.
The Soft2Bet project was an international effort coordinated by Investigate Europe and media outlets in 14 other countries. For our reporting team, Senior Investigative Reporter Mark Tighe and Data Journalist Rachel Lavin, the focus was on Irish angles that would feed into the wider work of the consortium. They worked closely with Maxence Peigné, a French reporter whose interest in the story began when he had first gone through lists of blacklisted online casinos in Europe and noticed the same name kept coming up: Soft2Bet. Our efforts would lead us on a trail from Malta to Curacao in the Caribbean, a First Nations reserve in Canada and an office on Baggot Street in Dublin.
By March the consortium had amassed a trove of internal documents and financial files. Using an AI tool that enables our journalists to search through vast amounts of documents in their research, Tighe and Lavin zoned in on a number of companies with direct Irish links and found that six Irish gambling licences had been issued to Soft2Bet-controlled companies. A former Soft2Bet staff member gave us useful insights into the internal work practices of the company itself.
To understand how these gambling platforms dealt with customers, our team created accounts with four Soft2Bet websites targeting Irish users to see if they carried out age-verification or ID checks. None did. We had extensive engagement with the three Irish regulators (Revenue, the Department of Justice and the new gambling regulator) as we tried to understand how these companies were given their licences. Tighe recorded an AI-generated call from the company and Lavin received 14 texts with gambling offers in two weeks.
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We also looked into the Soft2bet affiliated philanthropic organisation, The Yael Foundation, which funds Jewish children’s education, and contacted an Irish school it advertised as a recipient of its donations.
Along the way, the team spotted that a series of online casinos that claim to be regulated in Curacao and Anjouan had received positive reviews on the website of The Irish Sun – including one site that has been sanctioned in Spain and Australia for breaching their gambling laws.
In its news coverage, The Sun had repeatedly highlighted the problems caused by black-market gambling sites. In the UK, it is running a “Save Our Bets” campaign which highlights the dangers of black-market gambling sites. When we contacted the news publisher about the reviews, it disabled its sponsored online casino review section and said it had launched an internal investigation. We ran a news story on it a few days later.
In parallel with our work on the story itself, the project team worked with our Digital Development, Visual Media and Audio teams to come up with a design and a publishing plan that would do justice to the project. The Irish Times has been expanding its interactive storytelling capabilities; for a big investigation by Conor Gallagher in March, on Aughinish Alumina, we launched an immersive scrolling template produced by our editorial, design and engineering teams. This time we set out to find a style that reflected the world of online casinos and the computer software that powers them.
Lavin created an animation to illustrate one man’s story – we called him Stefan in the story, but that is not his real name – of falling into the web of unlicensed casinos, using network graphics to reveal the links between the companies behind them on each scroll. Every photo was given a signature neon green glow, and as readers went through the story, elements “glitched” to reveal that same neon green - reflecting the story of how Soft2bet’s online software company was secretly behind so many companies.
The news story, which led the site and page one in print on Wednesday, is here. The full immersive package is here. Watch the video and listen to the Soft2Bet episode of our daily In the News podcast tomorrow.
And look out for more from our investigations team in the comings weeks.
Ruadhán Mac Cormaic
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