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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.