A football fan has died after being targeted by “predatory” gambling sites.

Speaking at the hearing, Long’s sister Chloe said: “The gambling products he encountered were not harmless entertainment.

“They have deprived Ole of enjoying the game he loves so much.

“They were highly addictive predatory systems designed to exploit. And they did. They stole from Ollie — not just his money, but his peace, his future and, ultimately, his life.”

Speaking to the BBC, she added: “Ole’s gambles were exclusively on football, and football was one of Ollie’s biggest interests. He was a huge Liverpool fan, and we know he had a very big win early on, and that was a real problem for him.”

She said he sent farewell letters to his family in the days before his death.

She added: “In the note that Ollie shared with us, he talked about how he decided to commit suicide because of his gambling problem, how he felt he couldn’t escape it, how he felt it made him a bad person, that he didn’t want to be that bad person, and that he didn’t want to burden us anymore.”

The hearing was told that Long had tried to stop gambling on several occasions, and even volunteered as a peer helper for others affected by gambling.

However, in April 2023, he began gambling again, this time using illegal gambling sites that did not hold a UK license and were not blocked by GamStop.

The court was told there is an online phenomenon called “Not on GamStop”. It was explained that an online search for this term would result in a large number of websites instructing consumers on how to access illegal black market sites that are not regulated by the UK Gambling Commission.

Giving evidence, Tim Miller, chief executive of the Gambling Commission, told the court these sites “deliberately seek to target people who are already suffering harm”, marketing themselves to circumvent UK self-exclusion tools such as GamStop.

He said some of these sites are run by “criminal networks” involved with “terrorists and organized crime.”

“Because of our work, more than 81,000 individual URLs have been removed from search engines, many of which will no longer be on GamStop sites,” Miller added.