When Europe’s iGaming sector faced the 2024 figures, even hardened analysts were startled: nearly half of all licensed operators admitted that fraud had cost them more than ten per cent of their revenue. According to data compiled by the compliance platform Sumsub, forty-seven per cent of European operators confirmed losses above that threshold, while fifteen per cent reported losses exceeding twenty per cent. In an industry already burdened with moral suspicion, the scale was staggering. The numbers translated into more than five billion euros drained from a regulated market worth about fifty-five billion.
Fraud in gambling is not the cinematic image of a card shark palming an ace. It is algorithmic, systematic, and relentlessly inventive. Behind a screen, a player can become anyone. Some create dozens of accounts under different names, recycle stolen identities, or spoof devices and IP addresses. Others exploit bonus systems meant to reward loyalty — “deposit 100 get 100 free” — by duplicating the same offer across twenty accounts, running coordinated spins, and cashing out gains in one consolidated wallet. What begins as a marketing incentive turns into a loophole of industrial scale.
Operators detect these schemes using forensic tools — device fingerprinting, payment clustering, behavioural analytics — but as soon as one vector closes, another opens. “When we block an account,” said a compliance officer at a large Scandinavian brand, “it isn’t punishment. It’s system hygiene. But the next day, the same person re-appears under another alias, and if we block them again, they go to the press claiming abuse.”
Operators detect these schemes using forensic tools — device fingerprinting, payment clustering, behavioural analytics — but as soon as one vector closes, another opens. “When we block an account,” said a compliance officer at a large Scandinavian brand, “it isn’t punishment. It’s system hygiene. But the next day, the same person re-appears under another alias, and if we block them again, they go to the press claiming abuse.”
The picture is not confined to Europe. In the United States, federal investigators uncovered similar behaviour during the 2011 United States v. Scheinberg case, which revealed how deception operates through payment channels as much as through play. “These defendants, knowing full well that their business with U.S. customers and U.S. banks was illegal, tried to stack the deck… They lied to banks about the true nature of their business,” said Janice K. Fedarcyk, FBI Assistant Director. Her words capture the universality of digital deceit — not bound by geography, only by opportunity.
In brick-and-mortar casinos, such behaviour would never be romanticised. A gambler in Monaco who tries to sneak back into a blackjack room under disguise would be escorted out, possibly prosecuted. No one would defend their “right to play again”. Yet online, when the same conduct takes place in digital form, the moral sympathy often flows the other way. The casino is cast as the villain; the fraudster becomes the wronged consumer.
This inversion lies at the heart of a much larger misunderstanding about gambling in the digital era. The licensed online operator — bound by state oversight, AML controls, responsible-gaming rules and data-protection law — is the only actor required to enforce ethical boundaries. Still, it is the one most likely to be accused of crossing them.
Throughout 2024 and 2025 the Danish Gambling Authority, Spillemyndigheden, worked with national courts to block a record 178 illegal websites. Its annual report, issued in March 2025, noted collaboration with major platforms — Apple, Facebook, Google and Twitch — to remove unlicensed apps and advertising. Yet these high-profile enforcement actions do little to defend legitimate operators from reputational attack. A company that reports suspicious users or enforces self-exclusion limits can still find itself portrayed as predatory in public debates.
The contrast between land-based and digital gambling is sharp. “If someone cheats at a table in Monte Carlo, nobody asks the croupier to justify throwing them out,” said one compliance manager who requested anonymity. “But online, when we enforce exactly the same rule, we’re accused of abuse. It’s absurd.”
The absurdity is magnified by the economics. According to the European Gaming and Betting Association (EGBA) and H2 Gambling Capital, the European gambling market generated roughly €123 billion in gross gaming revenue in 2024, with the online sector now representing the majority of growth. Taxes from that revenue help fund public health, culture, and sport. In Denmark, the government’s share of gambling duty in 2023 was over €600 million; in France it exceeded €1.7 billion. Governments profit handsomely from the very activity they moralise against.
Meanwhile, licensed operators are legally compelled to protect players from harm: they must monitor behavioural patterns, impose deposit limits, prevent underage access, and cooperate with problem-gambling services such as Gambling Therapy. But fraudsters exploit those same protective systems. A self-excluded player can return under a new identity; a suspended account can re-emerge through false documentation. When the operator enforces the block, the fraudster cries foul — and sometimes finds sympathetic journalists.
Between 2022 and 2024, Sumsub recorded a 64 per cent year-on-year rise in gambling fraud across Europe. The most common schemes were bonus abuse, account takeovers, fraudulent chargebacks, affiliate manipulation and money-laundering through small-stake play. Each new layer of compliance — stricter KYC, two-factor authentication, document verification — brings a corresponding wave of innovation from the fraud side. “We estimate that only about seven per cent of our flagged cases are genuine problem gamblers,” another Nordic fraud-prevention lead told me. “The rest are organised deception networks.”
Those networks can be astonishingly sophisticated. In one UK case, a handful of accounts exploited a flaw in a bonus-progression engine, converting promotional credit into real money and draining €1.5 million in two months. Offline casinos have seen similar ingenuity: in France two men were convicted for using micro-cameras to photograph cards and relay them to accomplices by earpiece. The difference is visibility. Physical cheating is prosecuted and publicised; online fraud usually vanishes into the technical logs.
That invisibility shapes perception. Regulators announce fines against operators who mismanage AML or advertising compliance — rightly so — but they seldom publicise the enforcement taken against users. The absence of visible accountability fosters the idea that wrongdoing flows only in one direction.
In truth, financial fraud touches every digital interface. The European Central Bank and the European Banking Authority reported €4.3 billion in fraudulent transactions across the EEA in 2022 and another €2 billion in just the first half of 2023. Online gambling, with its instant deposits and withdrawals, is a natural magnet for such activity.
Denmark’s regulator has tried to push back. Its latest report describes data-sharing between tax authorities, telecom providers and internet platforms to detect illegal operators and payment channels. Cooperation with social-media companies allows rapid takedown of illicit advertising. Yet these mechanisms, focused mainly on technical enforcement, do little to protect compliant operators from public misperception or one-sided criticism when enforcement actions are misunderstood or misreported.
Industry veterans echo the need for symmetry. Former BetonSports chief executiveDavid Carruthers, now an advocate for transparent regulation, has argued that “regulated gambling, when properly policed, protects society far better than prohibition ever could.” Carruthers’ stance — forged through experience on both sides of the Atlantic — captures the paradox of moral judgment: when regulation functions, it looks invisible; when it fails, everyone sees the wreckage.
One parent interviewed for this article recalled discovering that her adult son, who had claimed he was “cheated by an online casino”, had in fact created eight different accounts using minor variations of his name. “He told me he was trying to get his losses back,” she said quietly. “He didn’t think of it as lying.”
The psychology of that statement — the belief that cheating to reverse a loss is somehow justified — runs deep. The gambling industry is one of the few in which consumers routinely justify breaking rules on the grounds of emotion. A player who loses feels entitled to redemption; if technology offers a path, morality becomes negotiable.
State monopolies, by contrast, are rarely vilified for the same behaviour. In Sweden, the state-run Svenska Spel controls much of the domestic gambling market; in Finland, Veikkaus holds a comparable monopoly. Both are profit engines for public budgets. No one demands that they be shut down for moral reasons. The ethical calculus seems to change only when private operators enter the frame.
The European Commission’s own Recommendation 2014/478 on consumer protection makes clear that licensed operators must ensure transparency and prevent underage gambling — but it says little about the user’s duty of honesty. The word “fraud” appears almost exclusively in relation to the operator, not the player. The imbalance is baked into policy.
A former investigator at the Danish authority admitted privately that “regulators expect operators to be perfect policemen. But we rarely consider that they’re being attacked at the same time. Fraudsters are faster than the law.”
It is tempting, and politically convenient, to treat gambling as an inherently immoral enterprise. Yet alcohol and tobacco — both addictive, both statistically more damaging — are celebrated fiscal pillars. Governments derive far more tax from beer and cigarettes than from slots and poker. The distinction is not moral but narrative: who controls the story.
For journalists, gambling is easy symbolism — risk, greed, downfall. For politicians, it is a field rich in virtue signalling. For players who cross the line, it is a theatre where guilt can be outsourced. And for operators that actually obey the rules, it is an environment where transparency is a liability.
In 2024, the European online gambling market employed more than 250,000 people directly and indirectly. Its contribution to national tax bases exceeded €25 billion. Those figures rarely appear in headlines. What does appear are the individual grievances: a locked account, a withheld payout, an angry post on Reddit that snowballs into a “consumer investigation”. Television crews rarely show the fraud logs — the cloned devices, the matching IP addresses, the forged documents. They show faces, emotion, loss. It makes better television.
Yet when one examines the technical evidence, the story looks different. Each blocked account is usually backed by forensic signatures: the same device ID used in multiple sign-ups, or identical payment tokens recycled across dozens of names. In some cases operators can trace entire “bonus-farming farms” — small groups of people coordinating hundreds of accounts, extracting welcome offers, and vanishing.
The irony is that the same journalists who attack online casinos for irresponsibility rarely acknowledge how these compliance systems work. A responsible-gaming algorithm that freezes a high-risk user might prevent a relapse into addiction; it also prevents fraud. When that algorithm triggers a block, the operator must follow procedure. Failure to do so could mean regulatory penalties, or even loss of licence. In other words, being humane can look punitive.
A senior lawyer advising several EU-licensed operators explained it this way: “We live in a paradox. If you don’t block, the regulator fines you. If you block, the media accuses you. The fraudsters know this and exploit it. It’s reputational blackmail.”
In physical casinos, the rules are visibly enforced — guards at the door, cameras on the tables. Online, enforcement is invisible by design, and invisibility breeds suspicion. The casino that ejects a cheater in Monte Carlo is applauded for vigilance; the platform that ejects the same cheater online is accused of theft.
The data, however, is unambiguous. Across the European Economic Area, the average operator invests between five and seven per cent of its gross revenue in compliance infrastructure. Fraud detection and KYC expenses in the UK and Nordic markets have risen by thirty-eight per cent since 2020. These are not the behaviours of an under-regulated Wild West. They are the costs of trying to play by the book in a world where not everyone else does.
The broader public rarely sees the other side of these stories — the operators that voluntarily report suspicious transactions, the ones that suspend advertising in response to social-harm studies, the companies that co-fund therapy programs for addicted players. Those initiatives are real, documented in EGBA’s annual responsibility reports, yet they vanish beneath the noise of scandal coverage.
A few countries are beginning to notice the imbalance. In the Netherlands, regulators have launched consultations on “dual-responsibility frameworks” recognising both operator and player obligations. In Malta, the Gaming Authority has proposed joint awareness campaigns explaining that self-exclusion circumvention is itself a breach of law. These are small but significant shifts in tone.
Still, perception changes slowly. The word “casino” triggers reflexive judgement. Even as the same governments run lotteries with odds worse than any online slot, the narrative persists that public gambling is moral, private gambling is predatory.
Perhaps it is time to redraw that line.
Gambling, like alcohol, tobacco, or micro-credit, is not inherently evil; it is a domain of risk regulated by human honesty. Fairness cannot be one-sided. If operators are obliged to verify identity, prevent abuse and act responsibly, then players should be obliged to play truthfully, within the rules they accept.
The industry’s critics often say casinos profit from loss. But every regulated casino also loses from deceit — and the losses are growing. Fraudsters are not romantic outlaws; they are part of a digital arms race that corrodes trust in an already stigmatised industry.
A Danish investigator summed it up bluntly: “We keep hearing about protecting players. Fair enough. But maybe it’s time to protect the fair players — and the fair operators — from the unfair ones.”
In the end, the real question is not whether gambling is moral or immoral. It is whether the game is honest. And honesty, as every dealer knows, is only meaningful when both sides play by the same rules.
