People looking for information about community councils in the Scottish Borders have instead been directed to online gambling portals.
Scottish Borders Council’s website has a directory listing all 69 community councils across the region, including links to their social media pages, email contacts and websites.
But BBC Scotland News has found that 16 of those links were instead directing users to pages displaying offshore casino websites, which bypass strict UK gambling laws.
The local authority removed the links when alerted to the situation by the BBC, but did not respond to a request for comment.
Cyber security expert Dr Daniel Thomas, of the University of Strathclyde, said the incident was an example of “domain squatting”.
Organisations deploy bots to buy expired domain names linked to reputable websites, or have desirable domains like .org or .org.uk.
It is not illegal to buy expired domain names.
Thomas said the community council websites would be attractive as links to their URLs appeared on the Scottish Borders Council website.
“When someone is looking for the community council and are met with this gambling portal they will think something is wrong and of course not engage with the site,” he said.
“But when someone is searching for these sites, the now re-directed community council site will be at the top of list, as it appears a local group is giving out suggestions on the best offshore gambling sites to use.”
BBC News
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