How Premier League Sponsors Run Human Trafficking Syndicates
World of Crime travelled to the Cambodia-Vietnam border to see how shady corporations, which sponsor star football clubs and players, are fuelled by human trafficking and illegal gambling.
By Lindsey Kennedy and Nathan Southern
The casino town of Bavet, nestled on Cambodia’s southeast border with Vietnam, may be the grimmest-looking gangster playground on the planet. Its main casino strip, which stretches a few kilometres in a straight line from the border gate, is no glitzy Las Vegas or Macau.
The road is flanked on each side by shabby guesthouses and gaudy mega-casinos in varying states of disrepair, Most of the real economic activity takes place in the compounds that sprawl out from behind these buildings. Some are physically linked to licensed gambling establishments, others are built as standalone office-dormitory blocks, but all are heavily gated and guarded, with high walls, typically encircled with razor wire, some with caged windows to prevent the workers inside from jumping to their deaths.
Suicides are alarmingly frequent here. Bavet is the major regional hub of a brutal human trafficking trade that supplies “online” workers to companies running online gambling, fake investment and crypto scams, and illegal porn sites.
*This article is part of World of Crime’s ongoing series on Football and Crime, investigating how organized crime is increasingly dominating the world of professional sports.
Access to these buildings is strictly controlled, and how much freedom – if any - workers have to venture outside depends on the companies or compounds they’re placed in.
Levels of exploitation vary, as do whether users of these websites are being scammed. But one thing is certain: all are categorically illegal.
Online gambling has been banned here since late 2019. There is no grey area. Any online gambling company working out of Bavet is a criminal enterprise. And given that they mostly target customers in countries where gambling is banned, like mainland China, they’re also complicit in moving and laundering billions of dollars in illicit funds across international borders.
Despite this, Bavet – often called by its Vietnamese name, Mộc Bài - is part of a web of towns and cities spanning Cambodia, the Philippines, Laos, Myanmar, the United Arab Emirates and beyond. They all act as hubs for colossal online gambling sites that turn over millions or even billions of dollars every year.
But they do not live in the shadows.
Many, in fact, have high-profile partnerships with world-famous footballers or pay six-figure sums to feature their branding on the shirts or stadiums of the biggest football teams on the planet – including several in the English Premier League.
A birthday party for OKVIP and its online gambling brands on 29 September 2023 in Bavet, Cambodia. The OKVIP branding features photos of Ronaldinho, Luis Suárez, and OKVIP/Jun88 brand ambassador, retired Brazilian footballer Roberto Carlos. Source: OKVIP Bavet’s Facebook page.
Brand Ambassadors and Criminal Kingpins
Being illegal, online gambling companies don’t have a formal presence in Cambodia, but many aren’t exactly hiding.
On Bavet’s main strip, the road’s central reservation is dominated by billboards brazenly advertising some of the illegal sites that operate nearby, alongside the clubs they sponsor and the high-profile football players who serve as their brand ambassadors. That includes Uruguayan player Luis Suárez, who has a sponsorship deal with 789Bet, retired Brazilian legend Ronaldinho for New88, Argentinian Ángel Di María, who once played for Manchester United and Real Madrid, as the face of HI88, Italian player-turned-manager Andrea Pirlo and former Brazilian star Roberto Carlos for Jun88, and former Manchester United goalkeeper David De Gea, who starred in this glossy advert for F8Bet in July,
These names all blur together, meaningless jumbles of letters, numbers and the word “Bet.” This is likely an intentional marketing strategy. All the brands mentioned above have the same owner: Vietnamese online gambling site OKVIP. This holding company is itself a major sponsor of Spanish club, Villarreal CF, and features Lionel Messi on the front page of its website.
According to OKVIP’s company website, in 2018, the company “invested in infrastructure” and moved its HQ to Bavet, having already begun targeting the Chinese online gaming market in 2015. This is a striking admission, as China has a long-standing, zero-tolerance policy on online gambling companies that target its residents from abroad.
In March 2021, the Chinese government introduced legislation that makes it a criminal offence to solicit or assist Chinese citizens to gamble outside the country at all. Last year, Chinese authorities arrested around 32,000 people for alleged cross-border online gambling offences and around 79,000 more on suspicion of running online scams.
These categories are often interchangeable: many illegal online gambling sites use the same techniques as fake investment platforms to lure customers into making bigger deposits, fabricating earnings or winnings, and then cutting them off when they try to cash out.
Screenshot from OKVIP’s corporate timeline on the company website, stating that OKVIP moved into the Chinese online gaming market in 2015, then invested in infrastructure in Bavet in 2018, which it chose as its new HQ.
To be fair to OKVIP, back in 2018, it was at least legal under Cambodian law to offer online gambling provided you had a casino licence. Many companies got around this by leasing space inside existing casinos, and those in Bavet were frantically constructing new buildings to accommodate this.
Google Maps lists OKVIP’s HQ as the huge office-dormitory block attached to the back of Good Luck Casino - a compound that is surrounded by high walls and patrolled by guards.
But despite Cambodia’s online gambling ban coming into effect more than four years ago, there’s plenty of evidence that OKVIP is still there. In April, to celebrate the Cambodian New Year, OKVIP Bavet’s TikTok account posted a video that appears to be shot from the car park inside the Good Luck Casino compound. On 1st October 2023, the company’s Facebook page posted photos of a “birthday” celebration for OKVIP Bavet and its sub-brands F8Bet, HI88, 789Bet, New88, SHBet and Jun88 in the same spot, with workers watching the concert from their dormitory balconies in the block behind.
Two months later, a YouTube channel connected to OKVIP in Bavet posted videos of the same location, trying to convince applicants that these jobs were not a cyber slavery scam. Vietnamese-language Google Reviews of the OKVIP Bavet location allege that the company is a “blatant human trafficking fraud” and that “they purchase people”, although others praise the recruitment company on the alarmingly low bar of letting some workers leave the building to buy food after their shifts.
OKVIP celebrates sub-brands operating out of its Bavet location at a corporate birthday party in September 2023. Source: OKVIP’s Facebook page.
The Manchester City Connection
It’s difficult to ascertain what the working conditions are like inside the Good Luck Casino compound where OKVIP appears to be based. But on the other side of the strip, behind the casinos, lies a sinister development that early marketing materials described to prospective Vietnamese Investors as “Henghe Bavet City” - owned by the Heng He Group, and comprising 25 massive buildings: a bright yellow casino, a hotel, and the rest a mix of dormitory and office buildings.
This entire mini-city is a looming, fortress-like compound, surrounded by high walls and barbed wire, with a heavy presence of guards on the gate; the sparkling artificial lake in the marketing materials is a stinking pit of foetid water and sewage. World of Crime could see that most buildings were full of people, but the public aren’t allowed near the so-called casino or hotel. Guards carefully check the plates of every blacked-out van trundling in and out of the one entrance to the “city”, and street sellers working nearby say they never see workers leave freely – you need a special pass, which only the big bosses appear to have. In June 2022, Cambodian media reported that a 28-year-old Vietnamese man died by hanging inside the Heng He casino (also known as Heng Heng) - believed to be a suicide - after just one day working there.
The Heng He Group, meanwhile, refers to a collection of similarly-named companies (Heng He (Cambodia) Co., Ltd, Heng He (Commercial) Bank Plc, Heng He Bavet Property Co Ltd, M D S Heng He Investment, Co. Ltd., etc) that list as their directors various combinations of the same few Chinese investors, plus a handful of senior Cambodian political figures and even the Prime Minister’s cousin. The group has been linked to human trafficking sites around the country, most notably MDS Thmorda Group Tech Park, which has been repeatedly raided for housing forced labour and online scams. In December, the UK government, plus the US and Canada, sanctioned Heng He Casino over its alleged role in running forced labour and online scams – including accusations of torture, holding workers hostage, and other inhumane treatment.
So is the Heng He casino also linked to football clubs? Absolutely.
In March 2023, Josimar, a media outlet devoted to investigations in the world of football, revealed that an online gambling company was recruiting workers inside the now-sanctioned Heng He casino.
That company was 8Xbet, a sponsor of Manchester City FC, the current English Premier League champions.
8XBet denies using forced labour in its operations and has sent threatening letters, via British law firms, to journalists, including the writers of this very article.
However, 8xbet has also ignored repeated questions (sent via the same law firm) on whether they still run operations out of the Heng He Casino, whether the company understands that to do so is a criminal offence in Cambodia and other jurisdictions, and why it believes the conditions that got this site sanctioned do not constitute human trafficking or modern slavery.
Illegal Online Gambling Sponsors of the Premier League
These companies – and Bavet itself – are the tip of the iceberg when it comes to shady online gambling companies sponsoring UK teams. Other examples include:
BK8
Currently a shirt sponsor of Aston Villa, BK8 also sponsored Norwich City until the club dropped them for posting reams of overly sexualised content of very young women to the BK8 Instagram account.
BK8 is an Asia-facing company (i.e. it targets users in many countries where gambling is banned) that is registered in Malta with sister sites including BK8 Casino, Bet Storm, Bet Screamer, Bet Neptune, Casimpo, and Dukes Casino. Its parent company, Black Hawk Technology, is registered in the UK, owned by Malaysian investor Ooi Cheah Hoong, and describes itself as offering “Software Development, Call Centre Operations, Game Development and Digital Marketing”.
Black Sire has posted numerous job ads for “customer service” roles at Victory Hill in Sihanoukville, a casino-and-organised crime city on the Cambodian coast – all of which are live-in positions in “hostel” (i.e. dormitory) accommodation.
These don’t specifically reference BK8 or online gambling (which would be illegal). However, back in 2021, a source who asked to stay anonymous for their own safety shared the transcript of a telephone conversation between Black Sire’s hiring manager and a person posing as a jobseeker at that casino. In the transcript, the hiring manager explicitly describes the company as being owned by the ‘mafia.’ In the transcript, the hiring manager detailed how illegal gambling operations were run out of this Sihanoukville casino, explained that the applicant’s role would be to launder money from Malaysian and Vietnamese gamblers. The manager also stated that the company is able to operate as it pays off the police and is allegedly under the direct protection of members of the Cambodian prime minister’s family. World of Crime was not able to independently verify these claims.
Net88
Crystal Palace’s main sponsor for the next two seasons, announced in June, was revealed a month later by Josimar to be an illegal Vietnamese online betting operator that appears to allow betting on cockfighting in Vietnam - where all kinds of gambling, and cockfighting in particular, are strictly prohibited. Even more disturbingly, Josmilar found that its official Facebook page and various mirror sites were live-streaming sex videos – partly, it seems, to promote special gambling codes for use on the site.
Kaiyun Sports
This mysterious online gambling and casino company signed sponsorship deals with Nottingham Forest and Crystal Palace in 2023. It doesn’t have a UK-facing website and, while supposedly represented by an agent in Makati, a district of the Philippines capital, Manila, when we visited her office address last year, we were told that no one of that name worked in the building and none of the brands she apparently represents were based there, either.
Past investigations by Play the Game, which traced complex transfers of trademarks, and Infoblox, which analysed the underlying digital architecture of the sites, suggest Kaiyun is just a rebrand of Yabo Sports, at one point the largest Chinese-focused gambling site in the world, and a former sponsor of Manchester United, Paris Saint-Germain and Bayern Munich.
In 2022, Yabo was forced to officially close down after a major crackdown by Chinese police, who claimed the network had illegally recruited 80,000 agents and over six million online gamblers. Several now-deleted Chinese media reports and a separate report by the Asian Racing Federation identified Yabo Sports (亚博体育) as run by Alvin Chau, and operating out of the Jinshui compound in Sihanoukville, Cambodia (subject of this Al Jazeera documentary on cyber scams and slavery), where it relied on forced labour and human trafficking. Chau, who was arrested in 2022 and sentenced to 18 years in prison in China in January 2023 for running a massive illegal gambling operation that handled illicit bets worth over $100 billion, is a Macau-born junket investor and, allegedly, the protégé of Wan Kuok-Koi of the 14Ks, a powerful triad (Chinese mafia) group. His Suncity Group empire ran VIP gambling rooms in casinos across Macau, Philippines, and Cambodia, owned one of Vietnam’s few legal casino-hotel resorts, and allegedly controlled “white label” gambling companies registered in the Isle of Man, used to licence secretive online gambling platforms that illegally target Chinese users - including Newcastle United sponsor 138.com According to the Financial Times, Chau also used Suncity companies to illegally smuggle oil to North Korea.