The Guardian Takes the Casino Secrets Leak to Britain, Naming Santeda, BC.Game and Stake

The newspaper's first reporting from the Curaçao regulator's files turns a licensing scandal into a question about who serves British players without a licence, and puts new documents behind its earlier reporting on the Santeda casino network. Its reporter also says the offshore trade is already moving on, to Anjouan and other lighter-touch licensors.

• The Guardian published its first reporting from the Casino Secrets leak on 26 September, saying tens of thousands of confidential files held by the Curaçao Gaming Authority (CGA) detail the inner workings of offshore casinos including Stake.com and the Santeda network
• According to the Guardian, Santeda's filings give email addresses at Upgaming, a business owned by Georgian businessmen, as contact details and record €15.59 million in loans to a company owned by Georgians linked to Upgaming, which says its business relationship with Santeda has ceased and that it is "subject to a targeted campaign"
• BC.Game, which the Guardian says has previously been accused of taking UK customers after surrendering its licence, also appears in the files; the newspaper said it had approached BC.Game and Stake for comment
• The files were taken by the Berlin hacker Lilith Wittmann, who says she spent nine months inside the regulator's portal; Softswiss and the CGA have both rejected the consortium's claim of a network of about 1,000 domains linked to the software supplier
• The Guardian's gambling reporter Rob Davies says casinos are already moving to jurisdictions with even lighter rules, naming Kahnawake, Tobique and the Comoros island of Anjouan

The Guardian Brings the Leak to the British Market

The Casino Secrets leak now has a British publisher. On Saturday 26 September the Guardian reported that the files, taken from the licensing portal of Curaçao's regulator, "detail the inner workings of some of the world's largest online casinos", including the Everton FC sponsor Stake.com and the Santeda network. It said some of the businesses "appear to be owned or operated by British citizens", while others, such as the Leicester City FC sponsor BC.Game, have previously been accused of targeting UK customers illegally.

Wittmann first published the material on 22 September with Follow the Money (FTM), NDR, NRK, SVT and Jetzt, and FTM's finding that the regulator licensed the companies behind Stake and 1xBet with ownership questions unanswered is repeated in the Guardian's account. The CGA has confirmed "unauthorised access" to its portal and said last week that the intruder used an applicant account registered under a false identity. The consortium's archive states that inclusion "does not imply illegal or improper conduct", according to Finance Magnates.

What the Guardian Says the Files Show

The main new finding concerns Santeda International. The Guardian and Investigate Europe reported in April that Santeda's casinos appeared to have targeted vulnerable UK gamblers who were trying to quit, without a Gambling Commission licence, and traced a paper trail to Upgaming, whose lawyers denied that it operated the network. According to the Guardian, Santeda's submissions to the CGA name a Georgian, Onise Chimakhidze, as its owner, but give Upgaming email addresses as contact details, and a cache of its files refers to Upgaming in the filenames. Santeda also made six loans totalling €15,590,000 to Buda Capital, a Luxembourg company owned by Georgians who hold stakes in or are directors of Upgaming. The Guardian says Upgaming did not explain the loans.

Upgaming's lawyers said their client could not "speculate as to why a third-party has listed their contact details without further information, or without having seen the documents", and that this could be because Upgaming previously had a business relationship with Santeda that has since ceased. They said Upgaming believed it was "subject to a targeted campaign by various parties, including with vested commercial interests of their own".

The files also cover Oddsbet, a VIP-focused betting company owned until 2025, the data suggests, by a British businessman whose filings gave his source of funds as "long-term crypto currency investments" and a £100,000 loan; his lawyers said the loan was never drawn and the business served only customers outside the UK. The Guardian notes that accepting UK customers after surrendering a licence, as BC.Game has previously been accused of doing, would be an offence under the Gambling Act 2005.

The Gambling Commission said it could not comment on leaks, adding that illegal gambling activity "is a threat that we take seriously". The CGA said it could not answer questions about an "ongoing, complex forensic matter".

The Wider Claims, and the Pushback

Reporters in the consortium attributed roughly 1,000 domains to a network linked to the software supplier Softswiss. In a lawyer's letter dated 9 September, Softswiss said it "operates no online casinos itself" and provides no gambling services to end users, and that on the German-facing brand Platincasino it may have supplied software components or access to game providers but was not involved in operations, according to Bitcoin.com News. The CGA said the network put to it had "been fabricated by you", and that shared technology platforms are "commonplace across the online gambling industry".

In the Guardian's Monday briefing, Davies said a Curaçao licence is a "fig leaf of respectability" that banks, payment providers and game developers can point to, and that the island "became the go-to because it had just enough respectability without any real scrutiny". As Curaçao has become slightly more rigorous, he said, casinos have moved where rules are lighter still, including Kahnawake, Tobique and Anjouan. Wittmann told the Guardian there was "a legitimate public interest defence in accessing this data".

The UK Angle Turns a Licensing Scandal Into an Enforcement Question

FTM's reporting asked whether Curaçao's regulator did its job. The Guardian's asks who is serving British players outside the Gambling Commission's reach, and with whose money. Britain's unlicensed brands are hardly hidden: 11 of the 20 Premier League clubs carry an unlicensed gambling sponsor, by Entain's count. What has been missing is documentary evidence of who owns and funds them. The files supply leads, but they were obtained by intrusion, and a regulator that will not comment on leaks is unlikely to act on them directly. Their practical value is to banks, payment firms, clubs and B2B suppliers, which can no longer say the ownership behind their counterparties was unknowable.

The Denials Draw the Line Where the Next Fight Will Be

The responses share a structure. Upgaming says a relationship with Santeda existed and has ended. Softswiss says supplying software is not owning or controlling an operator. Both distinctions are legitimate, and none of the reporting establishes wrongdoing by any company or person named. But they are the distinctions regulated markets are testing hardest, because a licensed supplier's platform and games can be what makes an unlicensed brand work. The CGA's answer, that the network was "fabricated", puts the regulator on its licensees' side of that argument at the moment its own diligence is the subject of the leak.

Curaçao's Scandal May Become Anjouan's Opportunity

The leak exposes operators that chose Curaçao, not those that have already left for Anjouan, Kahnawake or Tobique, and Davies's point is that the trade moves faster than the jurisdictions chasing it. If Curaçao tightens ownership checks, the operators most exposed by the files have somewhere lighter to go. The lasting effect of Casino Secrets may depend less on Curaçao than on whether payment providers and suppliers keep treating a licence from any of these places as evidence of scrutiny.

The files have given British reporters what the Gambling Commission has struggled to obtain: names and money trails behind brands that serve UK players without a licence. Whether anyone can use them, given how they were taken, will decide whether this leak changes the market or only its reputation.