The island that drives the world's illegal betting

By Steve Menary and Samindra Kunti, reporting from Willemstad, Curaçao. Additional reporting by Philippe Auclair, Jack Kerr and Matthijs van Dam

From the balcony of Cafe Gouverneur De Rouville, George Lichtveld overlooks St Anna Bay – the canal connecting the Caribbean Sea and the Schottegat, the giant natural harbour at the heart of Curaçao. The picture he paints of the island is far removed from the holiday destination most visitors come for.

“Curaçao is situated in a toxic environment,” Lichtveld, a former senior civil servant in Curaçao and veteran commentator on island affairs, tells Play the Game. “We are surrounded by cartels from places like Mexico and armed groups like the FARC from Colombia. It’s quite obvious that something is going on [here], but the government and the judiciary are not interested in investigating.”

Lichtveld has watched his island home become a hub for a giant illegal* online sports betting industry that fuels match-fixing around the world. Play the Game travelled to Curaçao to investigate and found that opaque operators use Curaçao’s loosely regulated remote gambling licences to expand globally, paying no local tax, and refusing to share information on suspicious betting that could indicate match manipulation.

The origins of Curaçao’s troubled betting industry can be traced back to World War Two, when offshore trusts were set up on the island to help Dutch businesses in Europe keep their assets away from invading Nazi forces. After the war ended, the island joined a handful of other Caribbean islands in offering gambling to attract tourists.

“Other islands were very hesitant to have casinos as they were associated with the mafia,” adds Lichtveld. “The [old] Intercontinental Hotel [in the capital Willemstad] was allowed to provide a casino, but the government said, ‘We will not provide a licence; you need to do that yourself.’” That laissez-faire attitude to betting regulation has persisted.

When Curaçao’s telecoms infrastructure was upgraded, the island became a hub for sex phone lines. In 1993, the island created an offshore licensing system, the Landsverordening buitengaatse hazardspelen (LBH), or National Ordinance on Offshore Games of Hazard. Online sports betting and casino operators followed.

Through the LBH, four private companies – among them Cyberluck and Antillephone – gained master licences and issued sub-licences of their own. These came with few or no anti-money laundering safeguards attached, let alone any requirements to report suspicious betting patterns. Abuse became rife.

Fuelled by a network of data centres that belies the island’s population of roughly 155,000, thousands of domains sprang up offering betting in countries where their operators held no licence. Curaçao-licensed operators became a byword for illegal betting – which the Macolin Convention, the only rule of international law on the manipulation of sports competitions, defines as any “wagering activity where the type or operator lacks authorisation under the local laws of the consumer's jurisdiction.”

The LBH was condemned for facilitating money laundering, with match-fixing used to move money through shell companies whose ownership was routinely obscure. After sustained criticism, new legislation – the Landsverordening op de Kansspelen (LOK), or National Ordinance on Games of Chance – came into force in December 2024.

The LOK replaced the LBH and put a new regulator, the Curaçao Gaming Authority (CGA), in place of the old Curaçao Gaming Board (CGB). One aim was to head off potential action by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) – the global watchdog on money laundering, terrorist financing, and the financing of weapons of mass destruction.

Despite this, a 2025 review by the Caribbean FATF highlighted continued weaknesses – among them, a shortage of skilled staff. This Play the Game investigation adds to that picture, suggesting that the LOK did not fix the problems created by Curaçao’s promotion of offshore betting – illegal betting included.

“A smokescreen”

The LOK was introduced by then finance minister Javier Silvania, who quickly attracted controversy for recruiting a team of Malta-based consultants to build the new licensing regime. Among them were Mario Galea – former head of the Malta Gaming Authority, accused of a conflict of interest after suggesting licence applications be routed through an entity linked to him, and Aideen Shortt – a Public Relations advisor.

Galea co-authored Malta's 2004 Remote Gaming Regulations but twice resigned from senior positions at the island’s Lotteries and Gaming Authority, in 2008 and 2013. Like the LOK, the Mediterranean Island’s offshore licensing system serves markets where they hold no local authorisation. And while Malta contests the Macolin Convention's view that the practice is illegal, it has required its licensees to report suspicious betting since January 2021 – an obligation Curaçao's sub-licence system never imposed.

Galea’s company, Random Consulting, was recruited by Silvania, who resigned in October 2025 after a leaked recording of a furious row with the head of the island's tax office. His political troubles predated that. In November 2024, forensic investigator Dr Luigi Faneyte filed a 400-page criminal complaint accusing Silvania of fraud, embezzlement, money laundering, and abuse of office around the issuing of provisional gambling licences during the transition to the LOK framework.

In a café at Wilhelmina in central Willemstad, Faneyte tells Play the Game he has still not received a response from the authorities since filing the complaint and argues that the LOK has failed to meet its aim of a safer, more transparent, and better-regulated industry.

“The two main goals were that the licence fee gets to the people through the tax office and to restore the reputation of Curaçao as the first offshore gambling destination, but the new law has not achieved that,” says Faneyte.

“External parties gained access to the licensing process for gambling operators worldwide. Galea provided the infrastructure, and there were strong indications that he manages the system and that Aideen Shortt is the voice,” says Faneyte, who describes Shortt as Galea’s life partner and a fellow Random Consulting employee. “Provisional licences were being approved without due diligence and payment processes, despite previous red flags.”

In his report, Faneyte claimed that Random Consulting was in effect deciding which licences were approved. Responding to Play the Game, Random insisted it played no part in deciding which companies were awarded licences. It also rejected the allegation that it runs the CGA, arguing the agency retains oversight of enforcement. “RCL provides technology, technical expertise and professional support to the CGA. It does not exercise the statutory powers of the regulator,” the company said. “RCL cannot grant, refuse, suspend or terminate a licence; all regulatory decisions remain exclusively with the CGA.”

“The LOK is being used as a smokescreen. This type of reporting does not happen here. In the past, one person did this, and he ended up dead,” says Faneyte, referring to Helmin Wiels, an anti-corruption activist and former leader of the Pueblo Soberano party, who was shot dead by Venezuelan hitmen in May 2013 after promising to identify individuals in the island’s underground economy, including gambling.

Since making his allegations, Faneyte has been in touch with the intelligence agencies in Curaçao and in the Netherlands about his personal safety.

In December 2024, Faneyte launched a whistleblower website and received user complaints about Curaçao licence holders from the U.S., Canada, the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, the UK, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand. He eventually took the website offline due to the volume of complaints but says he is using the material as the basis for another criminal complaint to the prosecutor’s office about the LOK.

The ghosts of Willemstad

The LOK was also meant to require licence holders to employ staff on the island. Instead, most operators carry on as before, using trust offices as a local representative – as Play the Game’s tour around Willemstad confirmed.

Play the Game’s visits to some of the island’s data centres and to the registered headquarters of online betting holding companies swiftly attracted suspicion. Receptionists at trust offices confirmed the address matches the holding company listed on the licence, but no one is ever available. After one visit, a member of staff hurries out after the reporters: “Tell me why you want to know this, why are you here?”

In one case, a trust office had moved, but the change was not updated on the company’s website. At the abandoned house, the post box lolls open. Inside are an empty bottle of rum and legal letters from Austria and Germany, where Curaçao-licensed operators have targeted local bettors but, players allege, failed to pay out their winnings.

“A shrouding technique”

While the Curaçao licensing system does not require the reporting of suspicious betting, trust offices must register with the island’s Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) and flag transactions under two sets of indicators: objective and subjective.

On the objective side, any transaction over one million Caribbean guilders (XCG) (~560.000 USD) must be reported to the FIU, a member of the Egmont Group – the global body through which national FIUs share intelligence on money laundering and terrorist financing. On the subjective side, trust offices are expected to use their own judgement and report movements that could indicate money laundering.

“If you are established in Curaçao, you are supposed to have a local bank account,” Peter Comello, a former assistant prosecutor in the Dutch police, tells Play the Game. “But the trusts use corporate service providers, so there is no oversight.”

“The money launderers know very well which channels to use: gambling operators will often be controlled by a trust, and behind that is another legal entity. That is a shrouding technique,” adds Comello, who has also worked in FIUs in Curaçao and in the Netherlands. “As an FIU officer, you ask countries for information and hit a wall. The CGA is supposed to be researching these entities, but whether that is happening in practice, who knows?”

Curaçao’s FIU lacks capacity and effectiveness to conduct these investigations, according to the FATF. Play the Game asked a series of questions to Curaçao’s FIU, including how many suspicious transaction reports it receives in connection with trusts controlling betting companies. No reply had been received by the time of publication.

Diligence not due

An undercover investigation by Sveriges Radio in 2025 examined how much due diligence the CGA applies before granting licences. Speaking to the reporters, who were recording the conversation without her knowledge, Shortt said the CGA had “lower demands” for responsible gambling and anti-money laundering rules.

Narrator: I ask why everyone is telling me to go to Curaçao if I want to start a casino for Swedish customers, but without a Swedish licence. Timecode: (15:00)

Aideen: The reason probably is because we are not putting any restrictions as to where you can or can’t do business.

Narrator: We don’t care where you do business, says Aideen Shortt. I ask her: Do you have lower demands than Sweden for example, in order to get a licence?

Aideen: Yes, lower demands…

Reporter: On? Responsible gambling…

Aideen: Yes and AML.

Reporter: Anti-money laundering…

Aideen: Yes, but lower demands in the sense that we have a base level. You are taking your bets in Curaçao…

Narrator: We have lower demands for responsible gambling and for counteracting money laundering, she says. The laws that apply are Curaçao laws, not other countries’ laws.

Reporter: So you can do whatever you want as long as you follow what Curaçao wants, but that is apparently not what the Swedish people would want.

Aideen: Yes, you’re adhering to the law of the country that you’re in.

Reporter: OK, so you say, keep to the local laws, but we will not check if you do?

Aideen: We expect you to conduct yourself legally at all times. But we believe in the good of the industry.

Asked about the recording, Shortt said Sveriges Radio had not given her a right of reply. Her full response to Play the Game can be read here. Sveriges Radio's producer told Play the Game that she was in fact offered one.

One licence, thousands of sites

Besides the controversy involving Galea’s Random Consulting, Faneyte’s complaint names another Maltese citizen: Mario Fiorini, chief executive of the trust group IGA. The two will face off in court in Malta in October 2026, in an action brought by Fiorini over Faneyte’s allegations.

In July 2026, Curaçao’s acting finance minister, Charles Cooper, said that the CGA pays Random Consulting 8.3 million XCG (~4.6 million USD) a year. In a swiftly produced statement that misspelt the word “finance” in its first sentence, Random described Cooper’s allegations as “worryingly inaccurate” and said it had been paid ~4 million USD since 2022, of which ~3 million USD came in 2025 – a concentration the firm attributes to deferred payments from earlier years. Silvania disputed Cooper’s figures, and the minister subsequently rowed back on some of his allegations.

According to Random, as of late July 2026, the 617 licences awarded under the new LOK system generated an annual revenue of around 34 million USD, plus another 3.5 million USD in application fees – in total, around 37.5 million USD. That is significantly lower than the licensing revenue per licensee in many other gambling jurisdictions.

Malta, for its part, allows neither sub-licensing nor the registration of extra domains under a single licence, and collected around 95.5 million USD across 311 licences issued in 2025. That larger income pays for a bigger enforcement team: the MGA employs around 170 staff, against less than 30 at the CGA, according to sources Play the Game interviewed. By comparison, the Dutch Gambling Authority employs around 100 staff and issued 22 online gambling licences in a year.

A Curaçao licence costs 48,000 XCG annually (~26,600 USD), plus a monthly fee of 4,000 XCG (~2,200 USD) and a one-off application fee of 9,000 XCG (~5,000 USD) – but no tax. In Gibraltar, a remote licence for an operator with gross gaming yield between roughly 27 and 409 million USD costs around 136,000 USD, while in Malta an annual licence fee is 29,200 USD plus a ~5,840 USD application fee and a 5% tax on gaming revenue.

The crucial difference is that for an annual fee of around 500 XCG (~290 USD), licence holders in Curaçao can register multiple additional domains themselves without a new licence application, which looks remarkably like the sort of self-licensing that began on the island decades ago.

Sources claim that more than 10,000 domains are now linked to CGA licences, and that the LOK has simply perpetuated the previous system with a different form of sub-licensing – again supervised by a private company with insufficient oversight.

“The new LOK is a show thing for the rest of the world because they do not have the manpower – Curaçao cannot handle this,” says Lichtveld. “To do so, we need an office of 2,000 people. It’s just a front. If these 10,000 casinos said, ‘let’s make this legal’ and complied with the LOK, it would not be possible. It would take 10 years.”

LOKed out

Operators with a Curaçao licence frequently use sport to attract customers, who may then struggle to collect their winnings. “Most [operators] don’t have sound procedures for the protection of gamers,” adds Faneyte. “We are getting a lot of customers in our courts – and in courts around the world – who are not happy because the [betting companies] are not respecting the laws of the countries they are operating in.”

The only recourse for bettors denied winnings by offshore operators is through Alternative Dispute Resolution providers (ADR), which try to negotiate a settlement or pursue court action.

One ADR, AskGamblers, helped recover 10.7 million USD for players in 2025, up from 6.9 million USD in 2024. The five most-complained-about operators on its list were all licensed in Curaçao and are all major sponsors of sport – particularly football and cricket – marketing to bettors in countries such as China and India, where online gaming is mainly prohibited.

Another such provider, Casino Guru, received 2,316 complaints about online casinos with a Curaçao licence over the past 12 months. In 19% of those cases, the operators did not take part in the resolution process.

“Complaints on online casinos licensed by the CGA have remained [at a] considerable amount over the past 12 months: they represent more than a third of all complaints that Casino Guru handles,” says Simon Vincze, head of sustainable and safer gambling at Casino Guru. “Positively, more than 80% of them end up resolved, which means that the casino has followed our complaints resolution.”

“[The] top reasons why people complain remain delayed payment, verification, and self-exclusion cases, which are on the rise,” he adds.

Cases involving players chasing unpaid winnings routinely crawl through Curaçao’s judiciary. Play the Game visited the court at its temporary premises on Emancipatie Boulevard Dominico F. “Don” Martina, while a new building is being constructed. One Spanish bettor is appealing against a refusal to pay him about 294,000 USD. His claim is against Santeda, a network of betting operators sub-licensed by Cyberluck that includes DonBet, Goldenbet, MyStake, and Velobet.

Santeda faced bankruptcy proceedings in Curaçao, as also happened to Barcelona sponsor 1xBet and BC.Game, which sponsors Leicester City. The judge ruled against the Spanish bettor, but instead of the two sides meeting in open court, a decision was taken in private and communicated later by email due to what a clerk describes as the summer recess. Another let-off for a Curaçao betting company.

Offshore for Europeans, by Europeans

The export market drives Curaçao’s gambling industry. While licensing accounts for roughly 1 per cent of the country’s GDP, operators are strictly forbidden from offering their services in the host nation itself. And while a Curaçao license does not give its holder the express right to operate in any other jurisdiction, bookies see it as a springboard into territories where they hold no domestic licence and may not be able to obtain one.

CGA regulations require operators to “strictly adher[e] to” the laws and regulations of countries where they offer their services, but enforcement is lacking. That’s why operators like LineBet, a holder of a Curaçao licence No. OGL/2024/565/0553, can get away with sharing at a major industry event – the 2026 iGB conference in London – that it targets markets where sports betting is banned or reserved to the state.

Those markets include Iran and Somalia, where sports gambling is illegal, and Morocco, where online sports betting is a state monopoly. Egypt, meanwhile, is moving to criminalise the practice. Linebet holds no domestic licence in any of these nations and should not be operating there. It does anyway, using sport as a promotional tool: its sponsorship deals include French football giants AS Monaco and Spain’s Athletic Club Bilbao.

Similarly, a large underground betting market operates in India, particularly for cricket – a sport in which Linebet has invested heavily. Linebet sponsors the Bulawayo Brave Jaguars in Zimbabwe and the Durban Super Giants in South Africa, and has signed the former England star Dawid Malan as an ambassador. In 2025, Linebet sponsored the World Championship of Legends, a veterans series played in the UK, where external integrity monitors flagged matches for suspicious betting.

Linebet’s trademark is registered to a German national, Michael Friedrich, and to Tonks Ltd, a company based in a flat in Cyprus with a single director, Viktoriia Surmava, according to the World Intellectual Property Organisation. In Curaçao, the licence holder is another trust company, Aspro – which doesn’t even have a director registered with the island’s Chamber of Commerce.

Play the Game audited more than fifty Curaçao-licensed operators and found links to Europe through their sites: from casino game producers in Scandinavia to money handlers based in the Mediterranean, and live sports data providers in Switzerland, Poland, and the UK. While Europe leads the way in some areas of the fight against offshore betting (the Macolin Convention, for instance), European companies function as a driving force of the offshore market – from the Dutch Caribbean territory providing the licences to the firms supplying the services.

An office you can only email

To get answers to the questions raised in this investigation, Play the Game visited the CGA’s office in Willemstad, which at first appeared empty. After 15 minutes left baking in the Caribbean sun alongside a team of consultants with an appointment to look into database issues, a CGA staffer finally let everyone in.

After the consultants traipsed off to help with the database, the receptionist called a member of staff, who explained that no one was available then or at any other time. “That is how we work at this organisation,” Play the Game was told. Questions could only be asked via email. Play the Game sent a detailed list of twenty questions on July 30. The CGA replied nearly a month later; its response can be read here.

What’s left for sport

Meanwhile, in the UK, Curaçao-licensed operators like 1xBet and 22Bet are offering bets in India on an amateur midweek cricket competition played at Hornchurch in east London in early August by teams such as the Fearless Lions of West Ham, who otherwise play Sunday friendlies.

A low-level amateur series is exactly the type of sporting event any responsible betting company should not be offering. UK-licensed operators, on whose doorstep the matches are played, do not offer them. But Curaçao-licensed operators do: the games are streamed live on YouTube, and that makes them simply more content. During this competition, one match alone raised more than 545,000 USD on betting.

The UK’s Cricket Regulator is monitoring the series. But Curaçao-licensed operators are under no obligation to report suspicious betting to it. Given how little oversight the system provides, staying alert to the problems created by illegal betting is about all sport can do.

According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, illegal betting is the number one factor fuelling corruption in sports and up to 1.7 trillion USD was wagered on illicit betting markets controlled by organised crime in 2023. Most experts agree that figure has only worsened.

Curaçao’s illusory reforms appear to be doing little to confront the global epidemic of illegal betting. Dutch police are present on the island and interested in the gambling sector, but George Lichtveld is not confident of an intervention. “It’s well-protected by the Dutch government because it’s all about their mentality,” he reflects. “Holland has always been half pirate and half priest. They are the first to point the finger and talk about morality, but they are involved in some of the worst things.”

* Illegal betting as defined by Article 3 of the Macolin Convention.