Hacked Curaçao Gambling Files Name Hidden Owners of Stake, 1xBet and Blaze.com

A Berlin-based security researcher says she spent nine months quietly inside the licensing portal of the Curaçao Gaming Authority (CGA), the regulator behind the Caribbean island's massive offshore online gambling industry. What she pulled out, according to Dutch investigative outlet Follow the Money (FTM), is now rattling one of the most opaque corners of global gambling.

Lilith Wittmann, 30, said on X on September 22 that she and collaborators "watched [the regulator] live at work" for nine months, gaining access by registering under the name of a trust-office manager already known to the CGA, using her own Gmail address and a fictitious entity called DreamCatcher Private Foundation, according to reporting by Casino.org and casinoreviews. Within days she had portal access, and she later uploaded software that widened it further, FTM reported.

The CGA confirmed on September 17 that it experienced "unauthorised access" to its systems, according to the Guardian. The regulator says the breach has been contained and its source identified, but a forensic investigation is still underway and the full scope of what was accessed has not yet been established.

What's in the files

FTM says its analysis, published under the banner Casino Secrets alongside media partners NRK, NDR, Jetzt and SVT, and in coordination with the Guardian and Investigate Europe, covers licensing applications, regulatory assessments, passports, tax returns and financial records. The outlet verified 897 ultimate beneficial ownership records tied to 767 individuals across 646 licensed entities, identifying roughly 800 owners linked to nearly 650 gambling companies.

The records name Serbian national Mladen Vuckovic as owner of Medium Rare NV, the Curaçao entity behind Stake, a crypto casino that sponsors Everton FC. Filings reportedly showed Vuckovic held more than $1 billion in assets in 2024. But CGA officials questioned whether he alone controlled the company, and their own audits turned up large loans and payments involving Stake founders Ed Craven and Bijan Tehrani, according to FTM and gamblingnews, neither of whom was listed as an owner on the license application. No wrongdoing has been alleged against Craven or Tehrani in these files, and the existence of financial transactions does not by itself establish undisclosed ownership.

On 1xBet, the files list Ihor Hniedash as owner and CEO of Caecus NV. FTM reported that CGA assessors suspected the company had multiple owners and sought more information about Hniedash's ties to Roman Semiokhin, Dmitry Kazorin and the late Sergey Karshkov, all publicly associated with founding 1xBet, but the license was granted before those questions were resolved.

FTM also identified 24 Americans among current or former beneficial owners across Curaçao gambling entities, naming only one: Nicholas Beugg, son of film producer Michael Beugg, who co-owns Prolific Trade N.V., the company behind Blaze.com, alongside Dutch national Nick van Gorsel, according to the gambling-industry outlet Gambling Harm.

The Santeda thread

The leak adds a new wrinkle to a story the Guardian and Investigate Europe broke in April: that the Santeda casino network illegally targeted UK gamblers trying to quit, without holding a Gambling Commission license. Lawyers for Upgaming, a company owned by Georgian businessmen, had denied their client operated Santeda. But CGA filings reviewed in the leak name a Georgian, Onise Chimakhidze, as Santeda's owner, list Upgaming email addresses as contact details, and reference Upgaming in filenames of submitted documents. A 2025 filing named Torniki Kapanadze as Santeda's finance chief; a LinkedIn profile shows a Tornike Kapanadze working at Upgaming. Lawyers for Upgaming told the Guardian they "could not speculate as to why a third party has listed their contact details," suggesting it might reflect a past business relationship that has since ended.

The political thread and the enforcement gap

Stake co-founder Bijan Tehrani, a U.S. citizen based in Australia, donated $1 million to a pro-Trump super PAC, according to Federal Election Commission records reported by The Australian. President Trump has separately posted imagery featuring the Stake logo on Truth Social. No source in this reporting alleges any connection between that donation and U.S. gambling enforcement decisions, and none has been established.

A coalition of state attorneys general urged the Department of Justice in August 2025 to crack down on offshore gambling firms taking bets from Americans, arguing federal enforcement has been largely absent since 2013, according to Gambling Harm. States have instead relied on scattered cease-and-desist orders, with mixed compliance. The leak now puts names to some of the American owners state regulators have struggled to identify.

The other side of this

This entire trove exists because someone broke into a government regulator's systems under a false identity and stayed inside undetected for nine months. Whatever the CGA's regulatory failures, that is unauthorized computer access, and the files reportedly include passports, tax returns and other personal financial data belonging to people who have not been charged with anything. Journalistic value doesn't erase that the underlying method was a hack, and the CGA's own forensic review of what was actually taken is still incomplete.

Wittmann is also teasing more to come: an alleged €250 million German gambling tax shortfall she ties to Platin Casino, which she calls "Germany's largest illegal casino," and claims that software provider SoftSwiss is closely linked to operators of hundreds of illegal casinos, according to Casino.org. Neither claim has been independently verified in the reporting reviewed here, and SoftSwiss has not been quoted responding.

No criminal charges have been filed against Stake, 1xBet, Blaze.com or their named owners as a result of this leak. Curaçao has told the Netherlands it abolished its old sub-licensing "master license" model under pressure from The Hague, but FTM's review of the leaked assessments shows CGA staff flagged unresolved ownership questions and issued licenses anyway, at least in the cases of Stake and 1xBet. Whether that pattern holds across the roughly 650 companies in the trove is the next question, and it's one only a completed forensic and journalistic accounting can answer.