How to Read This Article
Three categories of fact appear below, and they are not equivalent.
Our conflict of interest, stated plainly. SlotDrop earns affiliate commission from a casino that competes with Stake. We have no commercial relationship with Stake, and we are not paid by anyone to publish this. You should weigh that when reading. Every claim below is sourced so you can check it without trusting us.
The $41 Million North Korean Theft
On 4 September 2023, roughly $41 million in cryptocurrency left Stake.com's hot wallets across the Ethereum, Polygon and Binance Smart Chain networks.
Three days later the FBI published a press release naming the culprits: the Lazarus Group, also tracked as APT38, which the Bureau describes as cyber actors of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. It is not an anonymous claim or a security-firm estimate. It is a formal attribution by a United States federal agency, published on its own website.
The FBI stated that the same group had stolen more than $200 million in cryptocurrency during 2023 alone. Funds traced to Lazarus operations have been linked by US authorities to North Korean state programmes.
Co-founder Edward Craven described the incident to the press as a sophisticated breach that exploited a service used to authorise crypto transactions. Player balances were reported as unaffected, and the site continued operating.
Be fair about what this is. Stake was the victim of this crime, not its author. No regulator has suggested otherwise. But it is a legitimate question for a customer, because it is a question about custody: an operator that holds your balance in hot wallets carries a risk that a bank does not, and there is no deposit insurance behind it. The event is relevant not as misconduct, but as a measured demonstration of where the money sits.
Ordered Out of Britain
Stake never held a British gambling licence. It reached UK players through a white-label arrangement: the licence was held by TGP Europe Limited, and stake.uk.com ran underneath it. That structure matters, because it means the entity answering to the regulator was not Stake.
In April 2023 the Gambling Commission fined TGP Europe £316,250 over anti-money-laundering and social responsibility failures across its white-label brands.
In February 2025 the Commission opened an investigation after a Stake-branded watermark appeared on a widely circulated social media video featuring an adult performer, filmed outside Nottingham Trent University. Within weeks the outcome was settled: Stake would leave the British market, and stake.uk.com closed on 10 March 2025. The Commission published a consumer notice instructing players on how to retrieve their funds.
The significant part is not the video. It is that the fastest route to removing Stake from a regulated market ran through a marketing incident rather than through the gambling operation itself — because in Britain, the gambling operation was somebody else's licence.
The Win-Rate Investigation
In 2026, Bloomberg Businessweek published an analysis of gambling livestreams involving Drake and the streamer Adin Ross, both of whom have promoted Stake to very large audiences.
Bloomberg's method, as described in its reporting: journalists reviewed roughly 1,500 hours of live footage covering 25 players, and counted how often each hit a large win — defined as a payout of at least 1,000 times the base bet.
The reported finding was a split. On games owned by Easygo Entertainment, Stake's parent company, Drake and Adin Ross hit those large wins close to four times more often than the comparison group. On third-party games — supplied by studios Stake does not own — their rates were unremarkable.
Stake's response, in full context. Stake told Bloomberg Businessweek that the findings were "categorically incorrect", and argued that comparing win rates across different games ignores how game mathematics work. That objection is not frivolous: different games have genuinely different volatility profiles, and a 1,000× payout is far more reachable on a high-variance game than on a low-variance one. A raw comparison across titles can produce a gap with no manipulation behind it. Bloomberg's reporting stands, Stake's denial stands, and no regulator has ruled on it.
What a reader can do with this: nothing conclusive, but something useful. It is a reminder that a sponsored stream is an advertisement, that the person on screen is usually not playing under the same conditions as the audience, and that the question of whether a game is rigged is separate from the question of whether a promotion is representative.
The US Lawsuit
Stake.com does not operate in the United States. A separate site, Stake.us, runs a sweepstakes model using a virtual currency called Stake Cash, which can be redeemed for cryptocurrency or gift cards.
In 2026 a proposed class action was filed in the United States naming Drake, Adin Ross and Stake. The complaint alleges that Stake.us is an illegal gambling platform structured to work around the ban on Stake.com in the US, that the promoters were gambling with funds supplied by the platform rather than their own, and that the casino's tipping function was used to move money between the parties — with some of it, the filing claims, used to inflate streaming numbers on Spotify.
Status, and it matters. On 30 July 2026 a federal judge in Virginia ruled that the case must go to private arbitration rather than proceed as a class action in court. None of the allegations have been proven. An arbitration referral is a procedural ruling about the forum, not a judgment on the merits — and because arbitration is private, any outcome may never be published. These are claims in a filing. Treat them as such.
What a Curacao Licence Gives You
This is the part that affects you directly, and it has genuinely changed.
For years the Curaçao regime ran on a master-and-sub-licence model: a handful of master licence holders issued sub-licences with little supervision, which is what made the jurisdiction cheap and its oversight nominal. That model is being dismantled. The National Ordinance on Games of Chance — the LOK — passed in December 2024 and requires operators to hold a direct licence from the Curaçao Gaming Authority, with anti-money-laundering duties and player protection obligations attached.
For players, the reform introduced something that did not previously exist: licensed operators must provide free access to independent dispute resolution, players have six months from a disputed incident to file a formal complaint, and operators had to publish a complaints procedure with the regulator by 31 July 2025.
That is a real improvement over what came before. But the regulator enforcing it is not in a settled state. Reporting during 2026 describes the Gaming Authority's supervisory board resigning shortly after the new regime launched, and a criminal complaint filed against a senior finance official over the handling of provisional licences.
So the honest summary is narrower than either side would like. A Curaçao licence now gives you a complaints route that did not exist in 2023. It does not give you what a British or Maltese licence gives you, and the body responsible for enforcing it has spent its first year in turbulence.
What This Means If You Play There
None of the above is a recommendation for or against any operator. It is the documented record, which is more than was available on this subject a year ago and less than you would get from a company that published its accounts.
Sources
- Federal Bureau of Investigation, FBI Identifies Lazarus Group Cyber Actors as Responsible for Theft of $41 Million from Stake.com (September 2023)
- UK Gambling Commission, consumer information notice: Stake leaving the GB market (2025)
- Bloomberg Businessweek, Drake, Adin Ross Have Unusual Win Rates at Crypto Casino Stake (2026), including Stake's response
- CBC News, Drake faces U.S. class-action lawsuit over ties to online gambling company
- Curaçao Gaming Authority, online gaming regulation under the LOK
Every factual claim in this article is attributed above. Where a party has denied a claim, the denial is published alongside it. If any statement here is inaccurate, tell us and we will correct it.
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