The Summer of Exposés: Who Profits From the Unlicensed-Casino Story

Over three months in the summer of 2026, European readers were served more exposés of the online casino business than a typical year produces. They read like chapters of a single story. They were not. They were four very different products, made by different people for different ends.

July. On 8 July, Investigate Europe and 16 partner outlets, from the Irish Times to Germany's Bayerischer Rundfunk, publish the Soft2Bet Files, an investigation into a major industry supplier. Drawing on leaked payment records, the reporters allege that around €600m from unlicensed casinos was channelled through the group's Cypriot subsidiaries between 2020 and 2024, and that 145 of roughly 160 of the casinos involved were blacklisted in at least one European country. Former employees say it was common practice to reopen the accounts of players who had closed them because of gambling addiction. The company calls the allegations 'incorrect and misleading'. Three weeks later, Ireland's regulator opens an investigation into 145 of the group's websites.

Early September. After more than three years of covert investigation, Frankfurt prosecutors raid 11 properties. They arrest the main suspect. Five people are under investigation in total. Prosecutors say around €5.86bn in stakes passed through their casinos between July 2021 and the end of 2023. Assets worth about €82m have been frozen. All are presumed innocent until a court rules otherwise.

Late September. Berlin hacker Lilith Wittmann announces that she spent nine months inside the licensing portal of Curaçao's gambling regulator. Follow the Money, NDR, NRK, SVT and Austria's Jetzt publish Casino Secrets: roughly 800 owners behind almost 650 licensed companies. At the centre of the story is another of the industry's largest software suppliers. The company says it operates no online casinos itself; the Curaçao Gaming Authority dismisses the 'network' the reporters described as 'fabricated'.

Throughout, a different kind of website has been busy. One is devoted entirely to a single large technology supplier and has been publishing what amounts to a steady stream of kompromat since February. Another describes a 'syndicate' turning over $10bn, citing an unspecified 'internal analysis' without saying whose. Who writes for these sites, and who pays for them, is impossible to tell from the sites themselves.

A consortium with documents and a right of reply. A hacker who entered a state regulator's system under someone else's name. Prosecutors with arrests and frozen assets. Anonymous sites with big numbers and no sources. In the reader's mind it all merged into one picture: an unscrupulous industry and its hapless victims.

This piece asks a different question, one rarely put out loud: who is actually telling us these stories – and what does each storyteller get out of them?

Wolves and Sheep

The unlicensed-casino story comes with a ready-made script, and nearly every article follows it. Operators are predators. Players are helpless victims. The state is their protector, short of powers. The journalist opens people's eyes to the hard truth.

The script's appeal is that it spares you the trouble of thinking. The roles are cast in advance; all that is left is to fill in the names. But ask who benefits, and the answer is: almost everyone except the reader.

Law firms selling claims to recover gambling losses need a victim – no victim, no client. Regulators need a threat – it justifies budgets, headcount and new powers. The media need drama – drama gets clicks. Even licensed operators like the script: it lets them demand a crackdown on unlicensed rivals, and do so not in their own name but in the name of those very players. Which is convenient.

There seem to be no disinterested characters in this fairy tale. Everyone has a stake. That is hardly surprising; it is how the world works. The real problem begins when a party with a stake presents itself as an impartial observer – and especially when it wraps itself in the 'public good'.

The Platform Problem: Where Does a Supplier's Responsibility End?

The main characters of this summer were not the casinos themselves but the companies that build their software. To see why, it helps to split the industry into two very different worlds.

The first is the operators – the casinos players deal with directly. They attract most of the complaints from players, regulators and journalists, often with good reason. But operators are mobile. Their owners rarely appear in public. Companies change, assets move, brands are sold.

The Mr Green case, discussed below, shows how that ends for the player: a court judgment, and no difficulty enforcing it.

The second world is the platform providers. Soft2Bet, EveryMatrix, SoftSwiss, BetConstruct, Playtech, Kambi and other familiar names sell operators a gaming platform, access to third-party games, payment solutions and affiliate-management tools. Hundreds of gaming brands run on each of them; on some, more than a thousand. These are large companies with offices, known owners and their own big industry events. They are highly visible – and within reach.

Hence a simple mechanism: claims travel upwards, from the elusive operator to the conspicuous platform supplier. Everyone who pushes them up has a reason. A claimant's lawyer needs a defendant who can actually pay. A regulator needs an addressee its orders can reach. The media need a recognisable name: a story about a 'network' around a well-known brand gets read; a story about hundreds of anonymous Curaçao companies does not. In short, the bill goes to whoever has something to take – and whose name readers will know.

The platform makers' position is understandable and, in its way, logical. It usually runs roughly like this: we don't run casinos and we don't deal with players; we supply software to independent companies; that makes us neither their owner nor the one who controls their business – any more than Microsoft is responsible for what people do with Office.

Technology suppliers, incidentally, are themselves licensed and supervised by the relevant authorities. Regulators are, in effect, the only participants with a full view of their licensees' activities and the power to make official findings and act on them. Unsurprisingly, they have not stayed silent amid the recent waves of allegations against software suppliers.

Germany's regulator, the GGL, told reporters it knew Soft2Bet only as a technical intermediary and had no evidence that would stand up in court of the company's direct involvement in unlicensed gambling in Germany. Curaçao's regulator, the CGA, went further, calling the grouping of some 1,000 domains into a 'network around SoftSwiss' 'fabricated': shared technology, it said, is commonplace across the industry and does not turn individual licensees into a single network.

So the picture is this. Investigative reporters, in the language of moral outrage, accuse the latest capitalist villains of cheating ordinary people. Meanwhile the industry's giants and the state bodies charged with enforcing the law – the ones who actually hold the licensing files – calmly set out their counter-arguments.

What is the reader to make of such a flat contradiction – particularly since, as we will see, regulators have interests of their own? We will try to answer that at the end.

Offshore Jurisdictions: A User's Guide

Why does a German player go to a casino without a German licence? The answer requires no theories about human weakness; it is arithmetic. A licensed operator in Germany pays 5.3% tax not on revenue but on every stake. That eats into the return to player. A 2020 study commissioned by the licensed operators' own associations, DSWV and DOCV, estimated that typical slot payouts of around 96% would have to fall to roughly 90% under the tax – an interested estimate, but the arithmetic is hard to dispute. Add a stake limit, a deposit limit shared across all operators and a mandatory minimum game duration. Offshore offers the opposite: better payouts and bonuses, no limits, free use of crypto. For an adult who gambles with open eyes, it is a rational choice.

The choice has a flip side, though. Take one of many examples. The Malta-based operator Mr Green was ordered by an Austrian court to repay a player €62,878 in losses, in a judgment that was final by April 2022. By the time the case reached the EU Court of Justice (C-198/24), the money had not been paid and the player was trying to freeze the company's accounts. According to the claimant, the company had terminated its relationship with the Austrian payment provider Dimoco in 2021 to put its funds beyond reach. Offshore freedom works one way: while the player is losing, all is smooth; when a dispute arises, the operator is often out of reach, court judgment or not.

Behind offshore operators stand entire jurisdictions that have built economies on exporting licences. In 2023 Malta adopted Article 56A of its Gaming Act, known as Bill 55, which requires Maltese courts to refuse to enforce foreign judgments against local licensees. In June 2025 the European Commission opened infringement proceedings against Malta (INFR(2025)2100). In April 2026 Advocate General Nicholas Emiliou, in an opinion on an Austrian case (C-683/24), considered the referral inadmissible but added that, should the Court rule on it, the provision is 'manifestly incompatible' with EU rules on the recognition of judgments. In May the Court, ruling in the Mr Green case, allowed the existence of such a law to be taken into account when deciding whether to freeze a debtor's accounts.

Curaçao is a case of its own. A Curaçao licence confers no right to operate in Germany, and the regulator says it has rejected around 28% of applications since 2023. Yet according to Wittmann, internal documents show that the regulator knows full well in which countries its licensees operate without a local licence. For now that is one side's claim, but it raises an interesting question.

The video version of the investigation, by NDR's STRG_F, adds a detail. According to its reporters, licensees asked regulator staff more than 100 times to add so-called mirrors to the register – additional web addresses typically used to get around blocking in countries where a site is banned. Wittmann herself writes that the portal lets operators register an unlimited number of secondary domains. The regulator told the reporters that it does not help licensees evade blocks, that mirrors confer no right to operate where that is prohibited, and that it is aware of the problem of illegal offers abroad. A Curaçao licence, according to the leaked documents, costs about €47,450 a year.

The result is a remarkable arrangement. The jurisdiction collects licence fees, formally forbids operating where it is forbidden, and keeps a register of the very addresses needed to do exactly that. Whether this amounts to complicity is an open question. But the interest is plain: every licence issued is revenue for the island's budget.

So what does a small jurisdiction's licence really sell – the right to operate within the law, or the appearance of legality? The offshore model offers players freedom of choice. It does not forget its own interests either, and all too often that interest is profit without risk or obligation.

Germany's Regulator: Marking the Industry – And Its Own Homework

In November 2023 the GGL put the unlicensed online market at €300–500m a year, or 2–4% of the permitted market. The conclusion sounded reassuring. In March 2026 a study the authority had commissioned from the Blockchain Research Lab found that around 23% of online gross gaming revenue – that is, players' net losses – went to unlicensed operators: about €466m for 2023. GGL board member Ronald Benter said this confirmed the earlier estimates. Technically, he is right: the money is roughly the same; the key difference is the denominator. Divide by the entire permitted gambling market, lotteries and arcades included, and you get '2–4%'. Divide by online alone, and you get '23%'. Choosing the denominator is already taking a position. The study rests on a panel survey of around 2,000 online gamblers, self-reported over a year, and its figures were presented as indicative rather than definitive. None of that caution made it into the client's press release.

From 1 July 2026 the GGL temporarily – until the end of 2027 – allowed the stake limit on virtual slots to rise from €1 to €3 for players over 21, and to €5 after 90 days of monitored play without risk signals. One of the reasons given: keeping players inside the regulated market. Put plainly, the regulator conceded that rules that are too strict push people towards places with no rules at all. Bavaria's gambling-addiction service sees it differently: among clients of Bavarian counselling centres, the share for whom virtual slots are the main form of gambling rose from 6% in 2018 to 20.5% in 2024. Two state institutions look at the same slots and reach opposite conclusions – because they have different jobs.

Finally, the regulator is also a contender in the contest for powers. The GGL was quick to welcome the Frankfurt raids, stressing that it passes its own findings to prosecutors. Meanwhile, after losing at the Federal Administrative Court in 2025, the GGL is getting new tools: the German states are ratifying an amendment to the State Treaty on Gambling that extends blocking orders to internet access providers, and every high-profile case becomes an argument for the new tool. Which leaves the question: by what does the regulator measure its success – the health of players, or the size of the market it controls? The official evaluation of the State Treaty, due by the end of 2026, is being carried out by the states' supervisory authorities together with the GGL. The assessment is done by those being assessed.

The state: referee and market participant

In the player-protection story, the state usually plays the protector. It is less often recalled that it is itself the biggest participant in the market.

In 2023 German public budgets collected around €2.48bn in gambling taxes, 71% of it from lottery tax. Lotteries in Germany mean, above all, the 16 Länder lottery companies of the Deutscher Lotto- und Totoblock, owned wholly or by majority by the states themselves. The state that writes the rules for private online casinos earns most from its own monopoly. The same Destatis figures – and the statistics office has no stake in the market debate – show something else: tax from virtual slots fell from €430m in 2022 to €264m in 2023, a drop of 38.5%. The number doesn't prove where the players went, but the licensed segment clearly shrank under the new rules.

And Germany's main survey of gambling behaviour, the Glücksspiel-Survey, is funded, according to the GGL itself, by the Deutscher Lotto- und Totoblock, the association of state lotteries. The researchers' own press release says the same, and the results of the latest wave are published on the funder's website. Interpretation, the GGL stresses, is left entirely to the scientists, but the arrangement is striking: a market participant pays for the research on which its competitors' regulation is built. We are not the first to notice. The FDP group in the Bremen parliament has questioned whether DLTB-funded researchers can be called independent of providers, and has raised the same concern about the treaty evaluation. The awarding of the evaluation contract itself drew press scrutiny in 2023. Even addiction specialists have criticised the state lottery's own online casino in Bavaria. Private operators have made the conflict-of-interest argument too – Lottoland accused the GGL of shielding the lottery monopoly – though they, of course, are an interested party.

Austria makes the point even more starkly. Its only legal online platform is win2day, owned by Österreichische Lotterien, part of the Casinos Austria group, in which the state holds about a third through its holding company ÖBAG alongside the Czech majority owner Sazka. The state is at once shareholder, supervisor and licensor. From 2026 the levy on electronic lotteries rose from 40% to 45% of gross gaming revenue, and, according to Austrian press reports, in January–July the federal budget took in €543.8m, against €319.4m a year earlier. The country is now preparing to end the online monopoly, with new licences valid from 1 October 2027 – although a draft leaked in December 2025 would have kept the single licence. The key detail of the reform: a former offshore operator will get a licence only if it pays its outstanding taxes, satisfies all final court judgments in player claims and leaves the market by the end of 2026. The ministry speaks of around 20,000 affected players. The state is turning private lawsuits into a condition of market access – that is, into leverage of its own.

Where does protecting citizens end and protecting revenue begin? This is not an accusation: the state has every right to levy taxes and set rules. But readers are entitled to know that the protector in this story also sells the same product.

The Licensed Operators

Licensed operators barely feature in the usual script. They are not wolves, because they follow the rules, and not sheep, because they make money. Yet their position may be the clearest of all.

They want two things at once: softer rules for themselves and tougher action against unlicensed competitors. There is no contradiction here; it is ordinary market logic. When the GGL raised the stake limit, Entain, the owner of bwin, welcomed the decision as 'a positive signal for the regulated gambling market'. When Frankfurt prosecutors carried out their raids, both the sports-betting association DSWV and the online-casino association DOCV applauded – the latter adding a call to tighten the State Treaty.

Both decisions – higher limits and the fight against the unlicensed – benefit licensed operators directly. Blocking an unlicensed site protects players, but it also removes a competitor offering better returns. That doesn't make the measures wrong. But it is worth remembering that the voice of 'the legal industry' in the player-protection debate is the voice of a participant with a commercial interest in the outcome.

The same associations commission their own research, and their figures, as we will see, consistently come out higher than the state's. A high estimate of the unlicensed share is a strong argument for easing the rules for licensed operators.

So: are licensed operators fighting for player safety, or for a market closed to competitors? Probably both. But only the first ever gets said out loud.

Players: Two Kinds, One Legal Figure

The most awkward part of this story is the players. They tend to be spoken of either with sympathy or not at all. But players are not a uniform mass. There are at least two very different figures in the system, and both the law and public debate keep conflating them.

The first is the calculating 'adult'. He knew perfectly well that the site had no German licence. He chose it deliberately – for better payouts, no limits and easy payments. If he won, he kept the winnings. If he lost, he can now sue to get his losses back, because most German appeal courts treat contracts with unlicensed operators as void – a view the Federal Court of Justice endorsed provisionally in 2024. In economic terms, he held a free option: the upside is his, the downside becomes a lawsuit with a good chance of success.

The biggest legal questions have already been settled against the operators. In April 2026 the EU Court of Justice confirmed (C-440/23) that Germany's ban on online casinos before July 2021 was lawful and that claims to recover losses are admissible in principle. Operators had argued for years that such claims were an abuse of rights. The Court replied that being lawfully established and supervised in another EU country is not enough to defeat them. But note the detail: the question of the player's own possible bad faith was expressly left to national law. In other words, what the player knew, and what follows from it, remains legally open.

It is no accident that in the test case now before Germany's Federal Court of Justice, the claimant insists he did not know the games were prohibited. If knowledge didn't matter, there would be no point in saying so.

The second figure is the 'child' – at least in the eyes of a paternalistic state.

Without the metaphor: gambling disorder is a clinically recognised condition, listed in the WHO's International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11, code 6C50). The 2023 Glücksspiel-Survey put the number of people affected in Germany at around 1.3 million. For such a person, talk of rational choice and free options misses the point: their ability to control their behaviour is impaired. These are exactly the players whose closed accounts, according to the Soft2Bet Files, were routinely reopened.

The heroine of the Casino Secrets video shows what this looks like from the inside. Her lawyer explains that she had excluded herself everywhere and so could not gamble legally. Then, in her words, the addiction took over, and in a single night she lost €7,000 at Platincasino. Afterwards she went to a lawyer to get the money back – which, from where she stands, is perfectly logical. And it is exactly here that the two figures blur: from the outside, a claim brought by an addict and a claim brought by a calculating gambler look identical.

And that is the crux. The system does not tell the two apart. Courts deal with 'the consumer'. Law firms take on clients by the size of their losses, not by diagnosis. The regulator generally sets the same limits for everyone. In public debate, both figures merge into a single lamb in need of protection.

Both lose. The calculating adult is denied his own choice by being treated as if he were ill. The ill player is denied specific, personal protection by being dissolved among people who don't need it. Treating unequal cases as equal is not fairness – and history has shown more than once where one-size-fits-all ends up.

The question, then: who gains from not distinguishing between these two fundamentally different kinds of player? And what would change if the system began to?

The Loss-Recovery Business

On 17 September 2026 Germany's Federal Court of Justice (BGH) heard case I ZR 216/25. The claimant played with an operator – reported as Tipico Games – which at the time held a Maltese but not a German licence, and is seeking the return of €10,092 in losses. The sum is modest, but the case has been chosen as a lead case: around 300 such claims are pending at the BGH alone, and thousands more in the lower courts. Judgment is due on 28 January 2027.

A key detail: the claimant has assigned his claim to a litigation funder. Formally the dispute is between player and casino, but much of any recovery already belongs to an investor. Behind this sits an entire industry. A law firm finds the player; the funder covers the costs and the risk and, if the case succeeds, takes a cut – about 38%, according to one law firm. Without funders, this market would barely exist.

Law firms and funders are perhaps the only ones who win whatever the outcome of the public debate. The louder the scandal around unlicensed casinos, the more clients. The more helpless the player appears, the more convincing the claim. And they win not only in court but in the media – as we will see in the section on investigators.

None of this makes the claims unjust: courts keep finding them well-founded. But there is a question that, as far as we could establish, nobody has studied systematically: what happens to recovered money when it goes to someone with a gambling disorder? Does it go to the family and to paying off debts – or to the next casino? The loss-recovery business sells itself as player protection, so this question should concern it first and foremost. Then again, for its business model, a player who loses again is, above all, a repeat client.

Numbers and Who Pays for Them

How much do German players spend at casinos without a German licence? It depends whom you ask. Estimates published over the past three years range from 2% to more than 80%, and behind almost every one of them stands a client with an obvious interest.

The numbers measure different things: time spent on sites, losses as reported by the players themselves, traffic. In public debate, '50% of time' and '23% of money' are compared as if they were the same quantity. Each method has its blind spots. Surveys under-sample big players, traffic says nothing about money, and tax statistics see only the licensed sector.

Brief: How an Operator's Argument Became 'The Court's Estimate'

The claim that 'a court put the unlicensed slots market at 80%' is repeated by industry portals, studies and lawyers. What makes it persuasive is the reference to a court: courts have no commercial interest.

The figure did enter a court record. In its judgment of 31 October 2024, the Hessian Fiscal Court, weighing whether the 5.3% stake tax was proportionate, wrote that on this point it followed the claimant's submissions 'in full': the black-market share, it said, now exceeded 80%. That is how the passage is quoted by the claimant's own counsel; the judgment itself has not been published. The claimant was a licensed operator challenging the tax, and the figure rested on studies and material the operator itself had put before the court. It did not change the outcome. The operator lost, and in November 2025 the Federal Fiscal Court dismissed its appeals (IX R 27/24, IX R 28/24), recording the 80% simply as the claimant's argument.

Then the figure lost its origin. An industry portal wrote that the Hessian court 'sees 80%'. A study for Sport1 reported that the court had 'estimated' it. And in September 2026 lawyers advising gambling companies cited the court's estimate as an argument for higher stake limits. In every retelling the court remained; the operator who supplied the number disappeared.

The operator lost its case; its number won. No one had an interest in checking it: licensed operators need it to ease the rules, hardliners to justify blocking, claimants' lawyers as a measure of their client pool, the media for headlines.

And One More Benchmark

According to Frankfurt prosecutors, a single group took €5.86bn in stakes over two and a half years. That cannot be compared directly with the research estimates – stakes are not losses. But the scale of one case makes you doubt that any single method sees the whole market.

The lesson is not that research lies. It is that no figure can be read without the name of whoever paid for it and an understanding of what was measured. The most reliable data come from places where no one has a stake in the answer: tax statistics and court records – read in the original, including who put each figure into the record.

The Investigators

That leaves the participant usually treated as a neutral observer. In the familiar script, the investigative journalist stands outside the system and merely shows it to the reader. But journalism has its own market, and it is no less ruthless than the gambling one.

In the age of the endless feed, readers pay with attention, and attention is best bought with scandal. A complex picture in which every side has its reasons loses out to a simple story of predator and prey. The media produce what the audience buys, and that product is the exposé. Nobody needs to pay for it directly. It is enough that it pays in views, citations, subscribers and a reputation for fearlessness. The attention economy creates the demand, and supply is never far behind.

Summer 2026 displayed the whole spectrum of this market on a single subject.

At one end: consortium journalism. The Soft2Bet Files show how it is done well: 17 newsrooms, leaked documents, testimony from former staff, questions put to the companies and their answers published. You can dispute the conclusions, but you can see what they rest on. Even here, though, the laws of the genre apply: the language of 'empires', 'predatory tactics' and 'exploiting addicts' frames the story for readers before they see a single document.

Next: an activist with her own agenda. Lilith Wittmann obtained regulators' internal documents the public had never seen. That has real value. But her method raises questions that are usually asked only when the subject is an opponent. She entered the Curaçao regulator's system under the identity of a trust-office manager already known to officials, and stayed there for nine months. Before that, she got into the systems of Malta's regulator, the MGA. She argues that the public interest outweighs the way the data were obtained.

Tellingly, the dispute over her method has already reached court, and the result fits nobody's narrative. Berlin's Regional Court II partly upheld the MGA's claims (7 O 254/26 eV): Wittmann may not re-enter the regulator's system. But it rejected the rest: she may pass the documents on to journalists and authorities, and may publicly assert that the MGA potentially facilitates organised crime. The court drew a line between access to the system and access to the documents.

And there is a question hardly anyone will ask out loud: who actually makes use of a published database of more than 40,000 documents from the Curaçao regulator, with owners' names and company details? Among others, claimants' lawyers and litigation funders, for whom the hardest part of the job is finding whom to enforce against, and where. That says nothing about Wittmann's own motives, but it is a reminder that a hack can have beneficiaries – even ones who never commissioned it.

There is one more thing that rarely gets mentioned. Everything we know about these documents we know from the person who obtained them. Even a published archive is a selection: what was left out, how the files were chosen and in what context they sat in the system cannot be checked from outside. Trusting an account of a leak's contents because part of it has been published is rather like judging a book by the pages the reviewer chose to quote.

What is more, a claim about documents that nobody but the source has seen is not a document at all. It is an assertion – and should be read as one.

Which brings us to the most important question: where does journalism end, and where do the information trade and the smear campaign begin?

Further along: anonymous 'investigative' sites. For some time now, sites devoted to discrediting the industry's biggest and most visible names have been springing up like mushrooms after rain. Who is behind them and who funds them is unclear. A site devoted to a single company takes money and time. Competitors, former partners, parties to a corporate dispute, someone else? We don't know. But when such material turns up in search results next to a newsroom consortium's work, readers cannot tell one from the other.

And finally: the ecosystem that amplifies it all. Much of the German-language 'news' agenda on gambling is produced not by newsrooms but by affiliate portals and law firms. A law firm writes about a court ruling in order to find claimants. A telling example: within a day of the Frankfurt raids, the website of Dr. Redell, a firm specialising in player claims, published an article headlined 'Großrazzia: Fast 6 Mrd. Euro Spieleinsätze bei illegalem Online-Glücksspiel – welche Rechte haben Spieler?' ('Major raid: almost €6bn in stakes on illegal online gambling – what rights do players have?'). Overnight, a criminal case had become an advertisement for a service. A casino portal writes about regulation to steer players towards a partner operator.

Even an article in a mainstream Austrian magazine on gambling-law reform carries an affiliate link to a casino review site. While researching this piece, we also came across an 'analytical' article on the Federal Court of Justice's ruling that cited non-existent legal provisions – by every sign, generated by AI.

Instead of a Conclusion: How To Read the Next Round of Exposés

Walk through all the participants in this story and the picture looks nothing like the familiar script. Technology suppliers say they only sell tools and, logically enough, disclaim responsibility for how buyers use them. Offshore jurisdictions sell operators room to manoeuvre in a semi-legal space. Regulators grade their own performance. States that are meant to protect their citizens fill their budgets from their own monopolies. Licensed operators use their status as a weapon against competitors based in other countries. Some players who gambled with open eyes now sue as if they had not. Law firms and funders sell their services knowing they win either way. Researchers produce numbers that suit their clients. And some of those who feed the exposés work so close to the edge of the law that a court has had to draw the line for them.

In a post-truth age, mistaking an interested party's account for an objective picture of the world is not the smartest move. So instead of a ready-made conclusion, we venture to offer readers a toolkit: seven questions worth asking of the next headline-grabbing story about 'unlicensed casinos' – or about anything else:

1. Who is the author, and can you find out?
2. Who paid for the research, the investigation or the publication?
3. What exactly do the numbers measure – time, money, traffic, self-reports? And what were they divided by?
4. What is shown by documents, and what is merely asserted?
5. Who was actually harmed in the story, and what did the other side say? Is its response quoted at all?
6. Who benefits from this particular version of events?
7. What information product am I being sold right now?

Anyone who asks these questions stops being a sheep in someone else's script – whoever happens to be writing it: operator, regulator, lawyer or journalist.