276 US Localities Have Old Official URLs Serving Gambling or Spam

The figures come from a Mysterium VPN investigation, updated on 28 October 2026. Researchers checked 17,907 web addresses on 17 October, recording where each one led.

Of the 12,791 towns and counties whose listed websites could be examined, 499 had an address serving somebody else’s content. The gambling and spam cases made up 276 of those 499, or 55.3%. Around two-thirds of the affected pages promoted Indonesian-language gambling. Vietnamese betting brands and English-language casino affiliates were also present.

The Government Website Is Gone. The Domain Isn’t.

Worth County, Missouri, is one example. Its former domain, worthcounty.us, was registered again on 16 September 2026. By October, the address was serving ZEUS711, an Indonesian lottery-betting site.

Other domains were used as intermediate stops. Researchers found 95 old addresses sending visitors through at least two additional expired domains. Warren County’s former Pennsylvania address passed through five redirects before reaching TOKYO88.

Registration records also showed 92 taken-over domains registered during 2026.

Google’s search spam policies specifically identify affiliate content on a former government website as an example of expired domain abuse.

Wikipedia Still Points to Gambling Pages

The researchers found 449 English Wikipedia articles displaying an outdated address as the official website. Nineteen of those links led directly to gambling pages. That is 4.2% of the 449 outdated official-site links.

The cleanup extends beyond Wikipedia’s structured database. Across 882 articles linking to lapsed addresses, 864 had the old URL written into the article itself. Changing Wikidata would not fix those references automatically.

There was a separate problem on eight websites still operated by local governments. They carried injected casino links, including one active .gov domain. Unlike the expired addresses, these were cases of website compromise.

The survey covered a single day. Another 2,960 addresses could not be assessed because they blocked automated access.