WILLEMSTAD – A major international investigation based on tens of thousands of confidential documents obtained from the Curaçao Gaming Authority has revealed the identities of hundreds of people behind online gambling companies licensed on the island, while raising serious questions about how thoroughly Curaçao’s regulator investigated applicants before granting licenses.
The investigation, titled “Casino Secrets,” was published by investigative journalism platform Follow the Money (FTM) and written by journalists David Davidson, Sjors Hofstede and Lukas Kotkamp, with reporting from Curaçao by correspondent Dick Drayer.
FTM worked in coordination with Berlin-based cybersecurity researcher Lilith Wittmann and media organizations NRK in Norway, NDR in Germany, Jetzt in Austria and SVT in Sweden.
According to FTM, the investigation identified approximately 800 owners connected to nearly 650 licensed gambling companies that collectively operate thousands of gambling websites. The investigation alleges that licenses were repeatedly issued despite unanswered questions about ownership and indications that some operators were accepting or targeting players in countries where they lacked authorization.
The documents originated from a breach of the Curaçao Gaming Authority's licensing system by Wittmann. FTM reports that she gained access to tens of thousands of confidential records, including license applications, regulatory assessments and information identifying company owners. The material also contained highly sensitive information, including passports, tax returns and financial records.
FTM says it knew that the documents had been obtained through hacking and decided to use them because it considered publication to be in the public interest. Importantly, FTM says it restricted its investigation to documents Wittmann had already obtained in December, before the publication became aware of or involved with the breach.
The scale of the data allowed journalists to look behind Curaçao-based letterbox companies that had previously made identifying the ultimate owners of gambling websites difficult.
FTM manually reviewed company structures, personal disclosure forms and regulatory assessments. It says this allowed its journalists to verify 897 ultimate-beneficial-owner records involving 767 individuals, some of whom owned more than one company.
The investigation found that owners came from around the world, but most were from Europe, particularly Ukraine, the United Kingdom and Cyprus. The Netherlands accounted for 13 owners identified in the data.
The investigation is particularly significant for Curaçao because the island fundamentally reformed its gambling regime in 2024, replacing a decades-old system dominated by private master-license holders with direct government regulation.
FTM argues, however, that the reforms have not completely eliminated the transparency and enforcement problems associated with the old system.
According to the investigation, Curaçao-licensed operators continue to appear on foreign regulatory blacklists and receive fines abroad, while the ownership of companies can remain difficult for the public to establish.
The Curaçao Gaming Authority did not dispute to FTM that licenses had been issued while questions concerning some companies' ownership and corporate structures remained unresolved. The regulator argued that the industry is undergoing a transition and that companies have been given time to progressively comply with the requirements of the new legislation.
That explanation is now likely to become central to the debate in Curaçao: whether a transitional licensing regime appropriately balances reform with continuity, or whether companies were allowed to operate before regulators had sufficiently established who ultimately controlled them.
Source: Follow the Money, “Curaçao’s secretive gambling industry exposed in leak,” by David Davidson, Sjors Hofstede and Lukas Kotkamp, with reporting in Curaçao by Dick Drayer; Casino Secrets investigation in cooperation with Lilith Wittmann, NRK, NDR, Jetzt and SVT.