A PROFESSIONAL YouTuber and a businessman who helped to run a gambling website which let children bet on Premier League matches have been spared jail.

Craig Douglas, who lives in Ferndown, was ordered to pay fines and costs totalling £91,000, while Dylan Rigby was hit with a bill for £174,000 after the pair admitted breaches of the 2005 Gambling Act.

Douglas, who is known by the YouTube alias NepentheZ, promoted the Futgalaxy "social gaming" site, which allowed minors to use a credit card to place bets in a virtual currency.

The Futgalaxy currency could be converted into Fifa video game "coins" and then into cash, the court heard.

During a day-long hearing held at Birmingham Magistrates' Court, it was heard thar the unregulated site generated pre-tax profit of around £96,000 between July 2015 and February last year, with one 14-year-old boy losing £586 on a single day.

Douglas, 32, and 33-year-old Dylan Rigby were handed respective fines of £16,000 and £24,000 by District Judge Jack McGarva, who said both men had not been completely frank about their finances.

"The aggravating features of these offences are they were committed over a relatively long period of around six months," he said.

"Children were gambling on your site. It's impossible for me to know how many or the effect on them.

"In my opinion both of you were aware of the use of the site by children and the attractiveness of it to children. At the very least you both turned a blind eye to it."

Douglas, of New Road in Ferndown, admitted a charge of being an officer of a firm which provided facilities for gambling without an operating licence, and a further allegation relating to the advertising of unlawful gambling.

Rigby, of Creffield Road, Colchester, Essex, pleaded guilty to two charges relating to the provision of facilities for gambling and a third offence linked to advertising illegal gambling.

Philip Kolvin QC, prosecuting, said Futgalaxy allowed bets on football matches played in Britain, France, Germany and Italy, and was advertised by Douglas, whose YouTube channel had more than a million subscribers.

Mr Kolvin said gaming, betting and lottery features were offered by the site, which built up a 1.4 million-strong Twitter following despite having no operator's licence.

As well as offering accumulator bets on football matches, part of the site, which had no age verification, had an "I am impatient button" to speed up the rate at which gaming occurred, the court was told.

The court was shown video of Douglas appearing on his YouTube channel, with him telling potential punters: "You don't have to be 18 for this because this is a virtual currency."

Defence barrister Stephen Walsh, who represented both defendants, told the court Douglas "earned a good living" as a YouTuber, lawfully promoting a wide range of other products.

"They accept that there is a disparity between them," Mr Walsh said.

"Mr Rigby accepts he was the prime mover and Mr Douglas's role was as an advertiser and a promoter."

The court was told that the issuing of "coins" by EA, the operators of the Fifa video game, is entirely legal.

Platforms such as Futgalaxy were said in court to be "parasitic" upon lawful games such as Fifa, which forbids gamers from buying or selling its so-called coins on black market websites.