Gambling Firm 1XBet Branded ‘The Wagner Group Of Sports Betting’

The triumph of Paris-Saint Germain in the recent final of the UEFA Champions League marked the end of a long wait for continental supremacy for the dominant French club of the last fifteen years. It was also a triumph for one of their sponsors, online sports betting operator and casino 1XBet, which also saw their other main football partner, FC Barcelona, crowned Spanish champion a few weeks earlier. 

But to others, starting with the regulatory bodies which seek to exert control over an online gambling industry whose growth has gone virtually unchecked in the last decade and a half, this triumph was hard to swallow.

Corentin Segalen, the president of the Copenhagen Group set up by the Macolin Convention to combat sports manipulation and illegal sports betting, describes 1XBet as “the Wagner Group of sports betting” and told Byline Times how the company is “unafraid to operate illegally, fuel corruption and aggressively target the African market”. 

The parallel with Vladimir Putin‘s mercenary army was not a throwaway line. What Segalen referred to as well, was the ambiguous relationship between the operator and the Russian regime which Byline Times can reveal in the first in-depth investigation into the 1XBet betting empire published in the United Kingdom, and explains why it was sanctioned and banned in Ukraine on President Zelenskyy’s personal orders after his country’s invasion in February 2022. 

The size of 1XBet’s operation defies belief, but is in keeping with the size of the illegal gambling industry as a whole. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) estimated, in a December 2021 report, that it was worth 1.7 trillion USD – the combined GDP of all Scandinavian countries, or about three times the value of the world’s narcotics trade.

But is 1XBet ‘illegal’? Yes, according to the definition of the Council of Europe’s Macolin Convention (*), which defines an illegal operator as one who offers odds, and takes bets, in jurisdictions where it is not licensed.

1XBet does this in countries such as Morocco, where the Budget Minister and president of the Moroccan football federation Faouzi Lekjaa castigated their “illegal activities” and in France, until the authorities forced their unlicensed French site to shut down. It also did it in Somalia, where it is now outlawed. The list goes on, and on.

Yet this has not stopped 1XBet from garnering more gambling industry awards and distinctions than any other operator over the past few years, from Africa to Europe and Latin America.

As one African regulating officer, who prefers to remain anonymous, told Byline Times, “this is the biggest problem for us. They’re everywhere, they’re advertising everywhere, they win all these awards – so people think they’re legal when they are not.”

Gambling industry experts Byline Times spoke to believe 1XBet may be the world’s biggest visible illegal – under the Macolin Convention definition – sports betting operator in the world.

What is known is that they are now among the three most visited gambling websites on the planet – and that is just through their main incarnation, 1XBet.com, not taking into account the tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands (**) of affiliated companies and mirror websites which they have set up to broaden their offer and avoid detection by regulators over the past decade.

As they do not file corporate accounts in jurisdictions where those accounts are publicly accessible, their exact turnover is unknown, but, according to industry sources approached by Byline Times, it is likely to be in excess of 10 billion USD. 

Yet 1XBet became the “global partners” of the international basketball federation FIBA last December, despite FIBA being based in Switzerland, a country where 1XBet cannot operate legally.

They employ sports stars, rappers, comedians, influencers and porn stars such as Russian Eva Elfie as brand ambassadors to entice young men to open accounts in their key markets, which are now South Asia, Latin America and, above all, Africa.

It doesn’t matter that 1XBet is banned and the subject of legal action for illegal streaming of sports events in India. It doesn’t matter that Brazil refused to grant them a licence a few months ago. It doesn’t matter that the Moroccan government filed a criminal complaint against them last year. 1XBet keeps growing and appears unstoppable.

But this is not the most worrying thing about 1XBet; the most worrying thing is that there is now evidence that 1XBet, supposedly founded by Russian nationals who had fled Putin’s police, operates with the assent of the Kremlin and even supported its war effort against Ukraine.

They represent a security risk of such importance in the eyes of president Zelenskiyy that he intervened to annul a licence which had been granted by the Ukrainian regulator KRAIL to one of their subsidiaries after the February 2022 invasion.

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The Making of 1XBet

1XBet was set up by three men from Bryansk, the capital of the Bryansk oblast, which shares a 180km border with Ukraine. They are, Roman Semiokhin, Dmitry Kazorin and Serguey Karshkov, who rose to the rank of major in the Russian intelligence services and whose official title was ‘head of the Bryansk department of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs for combating cybercrime’.

Originally based in a modest shop called ‘The Bookmaker Pub’, 1XBet grew into a much larger online operation – despite not having secured a gambling licence from the Russian Federal Tax Office as required. 

An investigation was launched, which established that 1XBet had illegally generated the equivalent of over half-a-billion dollars between 2014 and 2019, and Semiokhin, Kazorin and Karshkov were put on the international wanted list by the Russian security services. 

One of the managers they employed in Bryansk, a woman called Olesya Mospanova, was arrested, put on trial and jailed for three years in 2021 for fraud and tax evasion, but her employers had long left Russia by then, settling in Cyprus, where they acquired “golden passports” (a now discontinued scheme which enabled wealthy individuals to acquire Cypriot citizenship by investing in the country’s economy) and set out to transform 1XBet into a global operation. 

While their exact whereabouts are unknown, Kazorin and Semiokhin, who are never seen in public, still live in golden Mediterranean exile, whilst Karshkov is said to have died in extraordinary circumstances in June 2023 when he suffered anaphylactic shock during a routine medical examination in a Swiss clinic. This is at least the common version of events for which the only evidence is a message posted by a friend of his on Facebook.

Yet this is not the most outlandish thing about 1XBet. Incredibly, the company founded and managed by wanted criminals on the run, seems to have regained impunity in its home country. 

At least one of their sub-brands (***), Melbet, is licensed and operates openly in the Russian Federation where over 150,000 subscribers follow them on VK, the Russian equivalent of X. 

None of the company’s founders still appear on the Russian “wanted” list. 

1XBet sponsored FC Dynamo Moscow, one of Russia’s most popular football clubs, from 2020 to 2023, allegedly paying four times the standard rate for such partnerships. FC Dynamo’s historical links with Russia’s intelligence services (from the Stalinian NKVD to Putin’s Federal Security Service or FSB) are well-documented. 

Moreover, Denis Bortnikov, the deputy-president of Russia’s largest bank VTB, which took a majority stake in the club in 2009 (****) and gave its current name to their stadium, is the son of Alexander Bortnikov, the head of the FSB which was responsible for the poisoning of political activist Alexey Navalny in August 2020. 

Both men, as well as the bank, are subject to international sanctions, which 1XBet has so far evaded – except in Ukraine. 

A joint investigation by Bellingcat and Norwegian investigative website Josimar revealed in October 2024 that “banned” 1XBet was organising over 500,000 so-called “short football” games per year on Russian soil, right under the nose of the authorities, in facilities used by licensed Russian clubs and even, in one case, for the weapon-training of Russian cadets. 

Bellingcat and Josimar identified one such venue in 1XBet’s hometown Bryansk. Six months after the publication of that investigation, “short football” games are still being played in that same Bryansk venue round the clock, every day, to offer punters a constant stream of matches to bet on. Authorities haven’t tried to stop them. 

Another way in which 1XBet and its satellite brands have tried to ingratiate themselves with the Putin regime is by allegedly donating money to the war effort through their Russian 1XStavka brand.

Advertisements appeared in the summer of 2022 on several Russian websites claiming that, “1% of all bets 1XStavka made in the Russian Federation will go to help the Russian heroes who were injured during their participation in the special military operation in Ukraine”.

1XStavka ceased taking deposits in January 2023 and lost its licence a year and a half later; its website is still functional, however, and offers live streams of sports events, while its VK account has 200,000 followers.

The toleration of the 1XBet gambling empire by the Russian authorities is not the sole reason why Zelenskyy intervened when it was revealed that 1XBet had set up another entity called “Your Betting Company” in order to circumvent the sanctions imposed on them after the Russian invasion.

“Your Betting Company”, a direct, but disguised emanation of 1XBet, had managed to obtain a licence from the Ukrainian gambling regulator KRAIL. When this came to light in Ukrainian media a petition was launched in June 2022 which got the 25,000 signatures requested for it to be considered by the President. After almost a year of legal wrangling its licence was revoked.

What Zelenskiyy feared, and his security advisers with him, was that any sports betting company linked to 1XBet, which would be allowed to operate in Ukraine, would be in an ideal situation to gather data from their Ukrainian customers, including active servicemen and women, and pass them on to Russian authorities. 

Members of the security services whom Byline Times spoke to are convinced that this presented a genuine risk, though they were not able to provide hard evidence that it happened.

But, this concern is not outlandish. The collection of dates of birth, address, phone number, banking details, and so forth, from gamblers represents a risk in itself when the sports betting operator in question is not licensed and regulated and there is no way of checking how the data is treated, and used.

Nicola Ingram, the former regulator of the Jersey Financial Services Commission, and now director of corporate risk specialist firm Oben, put it this way to Byline Times: “Providing information to ‘known entities’ such as large social media companies is one thing”, she said, before continuing:

Giving unknown unregulated operators access to your data is a clear risk for any person.  What such operators do with your data and who they might share it with should be of particular concern to users

Nicola Ingram, former regulator of the Jersey Financial Services Commission

The absence of any detailed data privacy policy on 1XBet’s websites is also one of the reasons why the Moroccan government filed a criminal complaint, which is still being investigated, against the operator.

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1XBet Going Global

This has not prevented 1XBet and its sister brands from expanding worldwide and escaping sanctions. Like other Russian sports betting operators, such as Leon.ru, Liga Stavok and Betcity, 1XBet carries on offering live odds on sporting events taking place in Ukraine. 

This raises the question of how a company which appears to operate with the tacit agreement of the Kremlin can get access to the in-play data needed to offer the odds, when the companies which collect that data are all based in Western Europe and are forbidden to trade with Russian companies. 

Another recent investigation by Josimar, in May 2025, identified the source code of that data and linked them to one of the world’s biggest data collection agencies, which doubles up as an integrity partner for a number of national and international sports federations.

Whether this data collection agency was providing the data directly, or a third party had sold them on to Russian operators, is almost impossible to establish; but the data got there in the end, enabling those operators to function.

1XBet is also a major client of gaming solutions provider Evolution Gaming, with one expert, Paul Leyland of Regulus Partners, suggesting that 1XBet was worth €200 million in revenue to the Swedish company in 2022. 

Yet 1XBet have so far managed to hide themselves behind a thin veil of “plausible deniability”, arguing that they operate a pyramidal franchise system “à la McDonald’s”, have nothing to do with the Kremlin, and can’t be held responsible for what their franchisees are up to in their respective jurisdictions.

This is the defence they had adopted in 2019 after, following an investigation by the Sunday Times, their UK licence was suspended by the British Gambling Commission and several Premier League clubs, including Chelsea, Liverpool and Tottenham, had to put an end to their partnerships with the Russian-Cypriot bookmaker.

An unnamed spokesperson for the company told gambling industry publication iGB at the time that 1XBet took “very seriously the allegation that 1xBet’s brand has been promoted on prohibited sites and that they had launched ‘an immediate internal investigation to ensure we improve our monitoring in this regard’.” If such an investigation took place, its results were never made public, and 1XBet is still banned in the UK. 

1XBet did not respond to requests for comment.

This article was developed with the support of Journalismfund Europe.

(*) The exact terms of the Macolin Convention, which was adopted in 2014 and of which the United Kingdom is one of over 40 signatories, states: “Illegal sports betting” is “any sports betting activity whose type or operator is not allowed under the applicable law of the jurisdiction where the consumer is located” (article 3.5 of the Macolin Convention). This definition is in line with the parameters of the World Lotteries Association and has been applied by the European Court of Justice.

(**) An unnamed 1XBet excutive who took part in a gambling industry conference taking place in May 2025 in Panama mentioned that his company “brought together 300,000 entrepreneurs (i.e. affiliates) from around the world” to service “millions of customers”.

(***) Sub-brands of 1XBet include Melbet, 22bet, Betwinner and 1XBit.

(****) The VTB Bank later transferred its shares to the members of the club but remains a core stakeholder in Dynamo.