Drake just needed some juice. In 82 minutes of online slots play, the Canadian rapper’s starting balance of $3.5 million worth of Bitcoin had dwindled to $422,355. The mood was grim as he click, click, clicked the spin button with tens of thousands of livestream viewers watching. Drake knew, though, that one of them could turn his luck around.
“Eddie, join the call, brother,” he said.
Drake had been invoking Eddie’s name throughout the stream: Eddie needs to fill up that balance a little more. Eddie says play roulette. Eddie needs to “make this s--- shake.” It sounded like Drake was appealing to some omnipotent deity.
In seconds a new window popped up near the ones for Drake and the three internet celebrities who’d been hanging out with him online that day in August. Inside was a man with staticky brown hair, a plain black T-shirt and AirPods: Ed Craven, the billionaire co-founder of Stake, the online cryptocurrency casino where Drake was gambling, and of Kick, the site livestreaming his play.
From his house in Melbourne, Craven told everyone he’d been watching the whole time. Now he was appearing to deliver a public pep talk to his assembled A-team, all four of them signed to multimillion-dollar contracts to advertise Stake. “The energy here is not good,” Craven said. Drake’s choice of casino games, he added, had been “terrible.”
Drake had now navigated to Speed Roulette, on Craven’s earlier advice. It wasn’t long before his luck shifted. A few spins in, he placed chips on 12 and spun the wheel. The ball settled in on 12, and he won $800,000. Craven added $500,000 more to Drake’s balance, telling the rapper to lock in and get those wins. Then he had some advice for Kick’s most watched American influencer, Adin Ross, a sparky bad boy who’d gotten popular streaming the video game series NBA 2K: “Get those clips viral, you know. Have a few of them with the Stake logo really clear and really f---ing big.”
Drake decided to test his newfound fortune on Puffer Stacks, a marine-themed slot game operated by Stake’s parent company, Easygo Entertainment. He leaned into his computer as colorful shells slid into place on a grid. He won another $800,000, and the word “INSANE” popped up on his screen. Over the next hour, he won big twice more on Puffer Stacks and once on a slot game called Rooster Returns, also operated by Easygo. He got his balance back up to $2.2 million. Then he kept on spinning, eventually logging off with just $730,000.
Drake’s hot streak had been hot, though. He’d won big—1,000 times or more his base bet, a common goal in the crypto gambling community—four times in just one hour playing Easygo-owned slots. That kind of luck is far outside the norm, according to a Bloomberg Businessweek analysis of 500 hours of live slots gameplay by 25 Stake gamblers. And that session wasn’t a one-off for Drake. When he played Easygo slots, he won big four times as frequently as the average rate—the equivalent of once every 2,500 spins, compared with every 10,000 spins, according to Businessweek’s investigation. Yet on games operated by third parties, his win rate was average. And Drake wasn’t the only influencer getting very, very lucky while broadcasting Easygo games on Kick.
Stake is the most popular crypto casino in the world, offering convenient access to slots, roulette, sports betting, poker with live dealers and more. It’s almost entirely unregulated, based in Australia and registered in the Dutch Caribbean island of Curaçao. Stake’s main site and affiliated domains get at least 127 million visits every month, according to analytics provider Similarweb. The casino estimates it takes 10 billion monthly bets and accounts for about 4% of all Bitcoin transactions annually.
This success has been accelerated by influencers on Kick, which since its debut in December 2022 has helped boost Stake’s traffic more than fivefold. In 2024, Stake said it had made $4.7 billion after paying out winnings, 80% more than in 2022. In December, Craven posted a screenshot of a third-party analytics site that put Stake’s yearly deposit volume at $18 billion.
Stake’s crypto casino has thrived despite being blocked in some huge potential markets, including the US, the UK and France. It’s banned, too, in Australia, where Craven lives and Easygo has two offices. (It also has offices in Brazil, Colombia, Peru and Serbia.) In jurisdictions where the site is illegal, people can use virtual private networks, or VPNs, to get around location blocking—something even Easygo’s own Australian workers do, according to former employees who requested anonymity because they signed nondisclosure agreements with the company. Stake also operates a site with a “sweepstakes” model in the US, offering users the chance to play for virtual gold coins and so-called Stake Cash, the latter of which can be converted to crypto.
Stake said in an email that it verifies every user’s identity and employs blockchain analysis to identify suspicious activity. The company said that it doesn’t seek out “customers in restricted jurisdictions” and that it “actively prevent[s] access through geo-blocking technology” and suspends or removes the accounts of players caught using VPNs. “Compliance risk is an evolving challenge for large platforms worldwide, not just Stake,” the company said.
Gamblers are drawn to crypto casinos over regular online betting sites for their lower fees, better bonuses and minimal, sometimes nonexistent, know-your-customer procedures. Stake allows much bigger bets than regular online casinos too, letting some players wager as much as 100 Bitcoin ($7 million) at once. The process is relatively low-friction for anyone accustomed to crypto: Create an account, load a digital wallet with one of the 21 virtual currencies the site accepts, pick your game, place your bets and then cash out your winnings, if any, via the blockchain.
Records seen by Businessweek show that some users gamble hundreds of millions in crypto on Stake every year. Drake and other VIPs do so with the encouragement and intervention of Craven himself. Text messages and chat logs viewed by Businessweek show that he can be in constant communication with high-betting clients.
Those clients have included Kick streamers with Stake marketing deals, who got crypto wallet refills and other white-glove services such as higher betting limits. Those deals can be extremely lucrative, even as the money they accept is often used for gambling. One influencer, Tyler Niknam, aka Trainwreckstv, told fans he’d accepted $360 million in the 16 months leading up to October 2022. By 2024 he’d wagered $18 billion in crypto, according to a screenshot someone posted on X after Niknam displayed his account information during a livestream. Niknam didn’t respond to requests for comment.
The jackpots Kick influencers win playing slots are also astronomical. In July, Niknam won a record-breaking $37.5 million worth of crypto on a $6,000 bet while playing an Easygo-operated game. A week later another Kick streamer, Ishmael Swartz, aka Roshtein, beat that with a $45.4 million win on a $10,000 bet, also on an Easygo game. Stake pays a thousands-strong army of “clippers” to scatter videos of its stars celebrating such wins, drawing in anyone intrigued by potential jackpots or the swagger of internet celebrities with $300,000 luxury cars. The clippers themselves received $500 per million views on their videos until December, when Stake raised the bounty to $800, according to someone with knowledge of the arrangement. (Like others interviewed about contract details and other sensitive matters for this story, this person requested anonymity to discuss private arrangements.)
Sponsored streamers tend to post Stake sign-up links and promo codes on their Kick pages. Rarely do they disclose that they’re being paid to advertise the site, or that their balances aren’t always drawn from their personal money.
The streamers’ seemingly infinite balances, splashy jackpots and social media virality have led some viewers to question the legitimacy of their wins. Craven has repeatedly denied that Stake’s influencers get more generous odds, stating in one blog post that “despite certain widespread notions of odds being rigged in some people’s favors or money not being real, we have no direct control of the odds of any of our games.”
But what about Drake? To fact-check Craven, Businessweek designed a way to calculate spins and determine how frequently big wins—again, 1,000 times or more the base bet—took place. The overall analysis spanned 1,500 hours of live footage on Kick from the 25 players, who included five superstar influencers—Drake, Ross, Niknam, Swartz and Félix Lengyel, aka xQc. Reporters used Anthropic’s Claude, a large language model, to analyze footage frame by frame and determine the balance, bet and games being played during livestreams. Businessweek then manually verified more than 600 big wins identified by the software and calculated the rate given the total number of each player’s spins.
Drake enjoyed unique luck playing Easygo games. He won big twice as frequently as the next-luckiest gambler Businessweek analyzed. Four people who played a comparable number of rounds to his never won big at all.
Asked for comment on Businessweek’s findings, Stake called them “categorically incorrect,” saying that “big wins” are an arbitrary metric and that comparing win rates across different games “ignores how game mathematics work.” Stake declined to share its data on player win rates or game payouts and didn’t respond to detailed questions about influencers’ odds or use of house money.
The company also disputed Businessweek’s approach to “bonus rounds”—extra rounds players either pay for or win—stating that they “have different game mechanics” and win rates. These rounds are sometimes sold on Stake as equivalent to a certain number of regular spins—a bonus round equal to 100 spins, for example, costs $1,000 in crypto given a $10 base bet—so Businessweek’s methodology takes this at face value. When Businessweek ran the numbers for Easygo slot bonus rounds in isolation, Drake and Ross continued to have the highest win rates. (Read more about the methodology here.)
Stake’s win-centered social media strategy has attracted adults and minors alike, sometimes in jurisdictions where the site isn’t legal, according to four users who gambled there as teenagers and legal complaints reviewed by Businessweek. Several say they ultimately spent uncomfortable sums of money on Stake after watching their favorite gamers’ gambling streams.
Class-action lawsuits naming Stake, Drake and Ross have alleged that their livestreams can make huge, statistically improbable wins seem normal, and that this can contribute to a misleading portrayal of the risks and rewards of online gambling. One such suit, filed in Missouri in October, claims that, by “prominently advertising these exceedingly rare outcomes, Stake exploits players’ cognitive biases” and violates state rules prohibiting deceptive trade practices.
There’s no international enforcer to ensure Stake’s odds are fair. The site’s business license is registered to a small office in a strip mall across from a cemetery in Curaçao, which had never fined a casino operator or revoked a license from one until last year. People with complaints about Stake, whether they’re alleging unfair business practices, targeting of underage or addicted players, or something else, have little recourse on the island. That’s left officials in other countries to mount their own responses. Regulators in jurisdictions including the UK, France and Ukraine have ordered internet service providers to block access to Stake’s website, while in the US, attorneys have filed at least 10 class-action lawsuits on behalf of players against Stake, in addition to the one in Missouri, calling the sweepstakes operation an illegal casino. One suit filed in California in August, which also names Ross and Drake, accuses the defendants of having “perpetrated one of the largest and most profitable illegal gambling enterprises in California’s history.”
Stake didn’t respond to questions about allegations in the lawsuits, but it has said it rejects allegations related to the California one and has argued that the claims in other class-action cases are meritless. Representatives for Drake didn’t respond to requests for comment. A representative for Ross—who’s since shifted his crypto gambling to a competing site, Rainbet—told Businessweek in an email that “We are confident that when the court applies the relevant law to the facts of these case[s], Mr. Ross will be dismissed from these lawsuits.”
The decade-long advertising campaign the lawsuits invoke has made Stake a hugely lucrative—and controversial—operation. The fantasy of the very lucky influencers at the campaign’s heart is an impossible one, of infinite money and improbable wins with no apparent repercussions. In the real world, of course, there are always consequences.
Before there was Stake, there was the dueling arena in RuneScape.
Craven, a teenager known in the online role-playing game as Edward5010, was raking in virtual gold betting on the outcomes of his fights in a sandy pit. It was called “staking,” and for him and his clan, the Australian Army, it could mean real money back then, in the early 2010s. RuneScape coins were redeemable for US dollars, albeit in violation of the game’s terms of service, on third-party sites using PayPal.
At some point stakers found a more reliable hustle: helping other players bet, by setting up wagers on the roll of a 100-sided die. (Fifty-five or higher and the house won.) There was more demand than supply for these games, especially among minors, who couldn’t easily gamble elsewhere. Soon, though, PayPal began flagging stakers’ accounts for “suspicious activity.” That led many to transact in Bitcoin, which had no such restrictions.
Among the stakers who jumped into crypto was a quiet Connecticut teen named Bijan Tehrani. He and a childhood friend, Christopher Freeman, then decided to expand beyond RuneScape and start a competitor to Satoshi Dice, a Bitcoin gambling game that had become a phenomenon in crypto circles. Craven, a RuneScape staking buddy of Tehrani’s, came on board too, offering to do light coding and invest some of his earnings. He took a 40% share, the same as Tehrani, Freeman later alleged in legal complaints.
The new site, called Primedice, opened for business in May 2013. “Welp. I’m officially addicted to gambling,” one poster wrote on the web forum BitcoinTalk after giving it a try. “Doubled my money though.” Word of improbably big wins and Bitcoin giveaways spread quickly, driving thousands to the site. Just a week in, Tehrani posted on the forum that Primedice was netting a profit. Freeman was excited enough to drop out of college to devote himself to the project.
A few months in, Freeman alleged in a later complaint, Craven began inching up his stake in Primedice by redistributing some of Freeman’s shares to himself and others. At the time, the filings said, Freeman’s sights were set wider: He’d begun to conceive a full-fledged Bitcoin casino that also offered slots and poker.
American regulators had been slow to catch on to gambling amid more obviously harmful applications for cryptocurrency, such as purchasing hard drugs or unregistered firearms. But Primedice was apparently pushing the envelope: In 2014, according to one of Freeman’s complaints, Tehrani consulted attorneys in New York about the site, and they advised him to shut it down. Tehrani didn’t respond to a request for comment.
That spooked Freeman. In the ensuing months he blocked access to Primedice from the US. The operation lost half its daily revenue in 24 hours, Freeman said in a complaint. With revenue plummeting, Craven and Tehrani told Freeman they wanted to pivot and open a regular-money online casino based in Australia, according to his complaints. Tehrani moved there while Freeman stayed back, still focused on developing his crypto casino concept. Instead of starting a regular-money casino out of Australia, though, Tehrani and Craven came out with Stake. In his lawsuits, Freeman cast himself as cut out and deceived. He sought hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation, alleging fraud and idea misappropriation. (Speaking with the Guardian in 2022, a Stake spokesperson called Freeman’s claims in the suits “internally inconsistent, intentionally misleading, and provably false.” One suit was dismissed without prejudice in 2024 because of jurisdictional and other issues. The other was discontinued without prejudice that same year. A lawyer for Freeman declined to comment.)
Stake.com went live in August 2017, offering Bitcoin betting on blackjack, roulette, dice and more. Tehrani announced it on BitcoinTalk, calling it “the future of gambling.” The site had a clean, cerulean-blue layout, headed with an image of a golden temple floating in the sky. A “Register Instantly” button sat above the message “Absolutely no details required.” Stake touted “provably fair” games and “rapid withdrawals” of winnings.
Craven started posting links on BitcoinTalk to Stake giveaways, contests and his Twitch channel, where he livestreamed himself gambling. He soon began advertising paid gigs for others to do the same. Just over a year after Stake opened for business, Tehrani posted on Reddit that it had more than 100,000 monthly players. The good times were starting to roll.
This was the world Chris stepped into at age 15. The Swede, who requested partial anonymity to protect his privacy, created a Stake account in the site’s first months in business. He recalls that he wasn’t asked for ID to verify his identity or age when he signed up, in keeping with Stake’s “no details required” promise.
He had money to spend. Starting at age 13 he’d built up a small fortune trading virtual weapons and other in-game items in the video game Counter-Strike and converting it to crypto. At first he only dabbled on Stake, but he came back in earnest in early 2020, after another gambler offered to hook him up with generous rewards and 25% cash back on losses.
Chris was surprised to find Craven assigned as his VIP manager. They began to communicate on Telegram—almost daily, Chris says. Still 17, as the Covid-19 pandemic was surging around the world, he started spending $10,000 to $40,000 worth of Bitcoin a week, sneaking games in on his phone at school and in his room at home. In one transaction reviewed by Businessweek, he deposited 14 Bitcoin, worth about $100,000 at the time and now valued at almost $1 million, in his Stake account. At no time when he deposited such large sums, Chris says, did anyone from the company reach out to conduct a know-your-customer check, required in some jurisdictions as an anti-money-laundering measure.
He remembers gambling deep into the night, chasing losses and often redepositing winnings he’d just withdrawn—clear signs of addiction. He says he mostly didn’t see the crypto he played with as “real money,” in part because it was difficult to cash out when he was underage. It was just numbers going up and down, like a video game.
On one occasion, Chris lost so much on blackjack and another game that he emailed customer service attempting to “self-exclude.” Some countries have self-exclusion programs that allow individuals to ban themselves from all licensed gambling sites, but Chris couldn’t participate in Sweden’s until he turned 18, and in any case it wouldn’t have applied to Stake, since the company was unlicensed there. His request to the site would be fulfilled only at its discretion. “You get into a bad mood, and you continue and continue until it’s all over,” Chris says of his gambling runs. “Then you get into a mini rage, and you just want to get yourself banned.”
Before following through on his request, Stake gave him a 24-hour “cooling off” period, to be sure he really wanted out. He didn’t. Often, Chris would message Craven, begging for bonuses or cash back—requests Craven typically met. In October 2020, Chris mentioned he’d gone down 110 Bitcoin in two hours at another online casino because of “stupid [high] amounts as limits.” Craven offered to increase his betting limit at Stake too. “We can get up to $100,000/hand,” he said. “I can set it for like 1 hour or 2.”
In most European markets, regulators require operators to limit the amount customers can deposit into their accounts and to carry out financial vulnerability checks on people spending above certain thresholds, ranging from a few hundred dollars to $1,000 per month. (In the US and Australia, among other markets, such limits tend to be voluntary.) European authorities also typically require companies to send regular messages to players about safer gambling strategies, including taking breaks. This never happened on Stake, Chris says.
After turning 18, email records show, he kept requesting self-exclusion from the site—more than a dozen times from 2021 to 2024. Each time, Stake would enforce the 24-hour cooling-off period. On one occasion in 2021, he endured the 24 hours, and his request for a six-month exclusion went through. Five months in, though, he gave in to his urge and set up another account, logging in from the same IP address as before and depositing funds using some of the same crypto wallets, without being flagged.
That December, after more heavy losses, Chris got through another cooling-off period and permanently excluded himself from Stake. Craven contacted him on Telegram shortly afterward, asking, “Hey bro, want a reload on Stake again?” Chris asked Craven if he could unlock his account. After realizing Chris had requested permanent exclusion, Craven replied, “unfortunately not man. I wish we could but it’s rly stricy now days.”
Chris had one other incentive to reactivate his account: It was where his affiliate income—a cut of the bets made by people who’d signed up for Stake using a referral code from him—came in. In June 2022, messages reviewed by Businessweek show, Chris sent another inquiry about unlocking the account, and Craven changed its status from excluded to suspended, which allowed Chris to remove the money. Two weeks later, Chris created another account and asked Craven to transfer his VIP benefits, such as the 25% cash back he got as a high roller, over from his old account. Craven agreed, then continued to provide reloads and bonuses to the new account on request, the permanent ban now effectively circumvented.
Today, Stake said in an email, “Self-exclusion and breaks in play on Stake are immediate, with no cooling-off period. Stake is dedicated to responsible gaming, and we offer tools to support this commitment. These include a self-assessment tool that puts users in touch with Stake customer support. With Stake’s help, or by themselves, users can create deposit and wager limits. Users can also choose to self-exclude from Stake for a set period of time or indefinitely. We also direct users to online support agencies that can provide help.”
Throughout his time on Stake, Chris would spend hours watching gambling livestreams. Initially it was on Twitch and YouTube, where he dabbled with streaming his own gameplay, then later on Kick. He noticed that some streamers who’d previously focused on video games pivoted to gambling as crypto casinos including Stake started cutting large checks. Clips of their big wins peppered his social media feeds, he says, triggering the itch to gamble. Chris suspected some of them were playing with house money or even with favorable odds, but he remembers only one streamer being open about how much of his own money he was wagering. “They aren’t really honest with their audience,’” Chris says.
Stake surged during the pandemic, as gamblers like Chris flooded in. Social media organized them into a burgeoning online subculture: “degens,” self-professed losers who gloried in the dirtbag lifestyle and the art of losing money.
Degen society was class blind. The crypto casinos weren’t like Las Vegas, where high-stakes poker players gambled in rooms separate from the bleary-eyed slots addicts. On Stake, millionaire influencers with seemingly endless funds gambled alongside players in far-flung trailer parks, wagering fractions of a Bitcoin on digital slots. Everyone was betting with their own money and fighting the same unfavorable odds—or so it appeared.
A shift began in 2021, as influencers who’d amassed millions of underage followers playing video games on platforms such as Amazon.com Inc.-owned Twitch were suddenly taking seven-figure deals to advertise Stake. By that summer, 64 of the 1,000 most watched Twitch livestreamers had played crypto slots on their feeds. Some acknowledged having sponsorship deals with Stake or its peers; others just let the good times roll. Posting on a blog in July 2022, Craven attributed Stake’s success to “a wealth of influencers who have used our product for months or longer.”
That summer, though, reports and social media posts began circulating describing young people falling into addiction after watching their favorite livestreamers spinning slots all day. Twitch then banned crypto gambling streams. Two months after that, Craven started Kick, saying he wanted a Twitch competitor that embraced a free-speech mentality. In apparent keeping with that message, early Kick broadcasters included Jan. 6 icon Anthime Gionet, aka Baked Alaska, and alleged sex trafficker Andrew Tate, who made appearances as a guest on Ross’ livestream. (Tate has denied the allegations against him.)
Kick employees built Stake’s influencer army contract by contract. Some streamers moved to Mexico or Canada, where spinning slots on Stake was legal. Some went live for as long as 15 hours a day, cashing in on five-figure-per-hour deals. When they won, they’d fling back their chairs and holler. When they lost, some would just shrug it off.
Many of Twitch’s biggest names crossed over to Kick, including Lengyel (xQc), a former esports star, and Niknam (Trainwreckstv), who got eight figures a month, according to a person with knowledge of his contract. The size of the deal for Ross, Kick’s most popular American influencer, is unknown, but he raked in what appears to be at least 26,000 Ether—worth a total of $78 million, based on the exchange rate at the time of each transaction—from Stake, from November 2021 to March 2025. (The Ether count is based on Businessweek’s analysis of blockchain addresses identified by Dune Analytics as belonging to Stake and ones associated with Ross that were leaked online.) Drake’s wallet has been credited from $45 million to $50 million worth of crypto per week, according to a former Easygo employee with direct knowledge of the account. One week, Drake’s wallet took in $190 million.
To the public, it’s not always clear where the influencers’ seemingly infinite funds come from. Some, like Swartz (Roshtein), start their Kick livestreams with hundreds of thousands of dollars preloaded into their Stake accounts and go on to gamble for hours every day. Swartz claims many of Stake’s top jackpots, and clips of him screaming in reaction to million-dollar victories proliferate across the internet. (He didn’t respond to a request for comment.)
Three former Easygo employees and three people who work with Stake contracts say that certain streamers gamble with house money. It’s something Niknam once acknowledged on his channel, criticizing influencers who carry on “as if they’re on a real f---ing balance when I know damn well they’re not, and Eddie knows damn well they’re not.” They’ve opted into “fill” deals, he said—meaning their balance is supplied by Stake, and they can’t withdraw all their money when they win. It’s essentially aspirational advertising for degens.
The top gambling streamers don’t just look fantastically rich; many also seem fantastically lucky. Last July, Ross benefited from good fortune similar to Drake’s in a marathon three-day slot-spinning session on Stake’s US “sweepstakes” site. The Kick stream was called “NO-Zempic (Fat Camp).”
On the third day, Ross was doing reasonably well, but he appeared frantic at times, pleading to Craven, who was in the chat cheering him on, whenever a line of slot-machine icons looked promising. “Eddie, please,” Ross said, over and over. After getting his balance just above $100,000 in Stake Cash—the token US-based users play with—he beckoned once again: “Eddie, give me another call.” Through the waves of emoji spam and heckling in the chat, Craven posted “hex appeal,” an Easygo-owned game. Ross navigated there and spent $5,000 in Stake Cash on a bonus round with a cautious $5 bet, then spun. It was the only time, out of the 15 Ross streams Businessweek assessed, that he played a proprietary Easygo game.
“Your due your 40m win i reckon,” Craven wrote in the chat, referencing a recent jackpot won by Niknam on a different Easygo game. Immediately, Hex Appeal’s icons began lining up on-screen. Ross touched his forehead in disbelief. “What’s going on?” he asked. Viewers in the chat spammed “WTF.” Ross began yelling. “Eddie, you’re in my chat dude, just do it!” The icons settled, and Ross leaped out of his chair. The words “MASSIVE WIN” appeared above the number $52,000.
He’d been fortunate, to say the least—in Businessweek’s analysis, wins of more than 10,000 times the initial bet occurred in just one out of every 170,000 rounds. But Craven was unimpressed. If Ross had bet $500, he wrote in the chat, it “woulda been 5m.”
This was Ross’ only big win while playing an Easygo-owned game across the gameplay Businessweek assessed. Although one win in 2,000 spins (from three bonus rounds, one worth 1,000 spins and two worth 500) doesn’t prove anything unusual occurred, the streamers in Businessweek’s analysis would, on average, have had to play five times as many spins to get it. Whenever Ross played slots that weren’t owned by Easygo, his big win rate was about average. Across the three days of streaming that saw his big Hex Appeal win, he averaged more than 55,000 viewers.
Normally, in the US and other jurisdictions, gambling advertising is highly regulated. Existing laws cover marketing using billboards, TV ads and online banner ads. Streamers, whose broadcasts can be challenging to classify and review, have largely flown under the radar. Because of that, and because Kick describes itself as a platform, not a marketing arm, it isn’t subject to the same rules and regulations an advertiser would be. As a result, something that might not be allowed for Stake might be allowed for Kick.
Craven has repeatedly stated that the two are separate businesses—an assertion that could, in theory, insulate the livestreaming operation from allegations of illegally advertising an offshore crypto casino to young gamers. “Kick is very much heavily isolated,” he said in July. “There’s very clear ownership lines.” When Stake shut down in the UK last year following a fracas over a branded social media video involving a porn star, a Kick representative told Bloomberg News that Kick would continue to operate in the country, including streaming influencers promoting Stake, because “Kick and Stake are separate entities.”
The companies do, nevertheless, appear to have significant overlap. They share a parent company in Easygo, with Craven as its lead. Other executives overlap too, including Tehrani; Easygo’s chief marketing officer; and its head of marketing operations, whose LinkedIn profile formerly said he directed marketing across both Stake and Kick. Data scientists, strategy experts, human resources workers and other employees all mention working with both companies in their LinkedIn profiles. Those profiles show, as well, that Easygo employees often shift roles between Stake and Kick. No one has to travel very far, since the two companies are headquartered in the same well-furnished office at 287 Collins St. in Melbourne.
Online, too, the brands commingle. In addition to the clips of Stake’s big, improbable wins, ones showing Kick influencers acting wacky sometimes go viral on short-form video apps or get reformatted for gambling compilations on YouTube, with Stake’s logo visible. Under contracts reviewed by Businessweek, some influencers with Stake partnerships receive as much as $10,000 for every Instagram reel they clip from Kick and post featuring the site’s gameplay and branding. The goal of the partnership, one contract reads, is to generate “viral” reels on Instagram that “push the referral link and promo code as much as possible.”
Stake also has an affiliate marketing program that’s seen meme account operators slap the company’s logo on unrelated social media posts—everything from South Park clips to motivational quotes to rage bait comparing Drake’s treatment by comedian Conan O’Brien to the lynching of Emmett Till. Because the platforms view these posts as organic, they aren’t generally treated as rule violations.
The companies’ offline marketing strategies overlap too. Stake’s advertising arsenal, which includes sponsorship deals with Premier League football team Everton and UFC fighter Israel Adesanya, also includes a Formula One racing team that competes under the Stake brand in countries where gambling ads are legal and the Kick brand in ones where they’re not.
Officials have started to take notice, notably in the US lawsuits that name influencers and trace links between their marketing of rare outcomes and problem gambling. Some of the suits also allege that influencers such as Drake and Ross gamble with house money. (Representatives for Drake and Ross didn’t respond to requests for comment on this.) The Federal Trade Commission did strengthen its guidelines around influencer marketing in 2023. Now, says Whitney Fore, a lawyer who specializes in gaming, “material connections—whether they involve cash, free play or ‘house money’—must be disclosed in a way that’s difficult to miss.” For livestreams this must be more than just a single hashtag or mention, Fore adds. Undisclosed or misleading partnerships can trigger a fine of as much as $43,000 per violation.
Research has shown that the fast-paced online slots Stake specializes in are among the most addictive and harmful forms of gambling. “You have the most addictive product being promoted to the most vulnerable people in the most insidious ways,” says Will Prochaska, director of the UK-based Coalition to End Gambling Ads. “It’s a cocktail for harm.”
Indeed, two former Stake employees, who requested anonymity because they signed nondisclosure agreements, say the company’s social media inboxes are inundated with suicide threats from problem gamblers. Stake didn’t respond to questions about such threats.
Some players who say they were wronged by Stake have sought out Nardy Cramm. From self-imposed exile in a Mediterranean beach town, the Dutch activist and journalist has been battling the company and similar Curaçao-licensed operators that have allegedly harmed minors and problem gamblers. Thousands of gambling sites have flocked to the tiny island, which is part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands but has its own government, to take advantage of its fast and affordable licensing process.
Cramm lived there for years, developing intricate knowledge of local rules and enlisting a team of lawyers to help desperate gamblers get their money back from unscrupulous operators. “There are lots of victims from Stake. So many minors somehow end up there, and they are usually addicted,” Cramm says. (The company has argued in legal filings that minors are violating the platform’s terms of service by signing up.)
Challenging the status quo on Curaçao can be dangerous: In 2013, Helmin Wiels, a popular local politician who’d threatened to expose corruption in the online gambling licensing system, was shot dead by masked gunmen on a busy beach in broad daylight. Cramm herself left more than a decade ago after receiving a thinly veiled death threat from a notorious island kingpin.
Since 2019 her organization, which translates from Dutch as the Foundation for the Representation of the Interests of Victims of Online Gambling (SBGOK), has handled complaints from hundreds of alleged victims of Curaçao-registered online casinos. The island does impose some safety requirements in granting licenses, and the foundation tries to identify ways the operators have failed to uphold them. Then it drafts demand letters and sues the companies, taking a cut of any damages awarded. Chris, the young Swedish gambler, is among those seeking compensation—his years of transaction records and chat logs with Craven offered Cramm’s foundation evidence it found compelling that the company had allowed a minor to sign up and an addict to keep spinning. (A letter sent by a Curaçao-based law firm representing Stake in response to his complaint said that Chris intentionally violated Stake’s terms and conditions by registering from Sweden with “inaccurate” information and that he was playing the “gambling addiction card” to recover his losses.)
Going after Stake can be challenging—its corporate structure is multifaceted and far-flung. There’s its primary gambling licensee, Medium Rare NV, in Curaçao. Then there’s the corporate HQ back in Australia, featuring Stake Gaming, Kick, Easygo and a constellation of related companies. Payment processing takes place in Cyprus, under Medium Rare Ltd. There are game developers in the UK, a call center in Serbia, and Stake subsidiaries in Brazil, Italy and Canada.
To date, Cramm’s foundation has won more than €15 million ($17.7 million) in settlements and court-ordered compensation for over 100 players from more than a dozen countries who lost significant sums on Curaçao-registered gambling sites. Only a small fraction of the money it’s won has come from Stake, according to Cramm, even though she says it has received dozens of complaints from the site’s gamblers. In her experience, Stake denies allegations of wrongdoing even when the foundation has what she sees as mountains of evidence, and the company will file counterclaims or otherwise drag out the proceedings. “They play very nasty,” she says. (Stake says it “categorically rejects the suggestion that it engages in improper conduct when faced with legal claims. As is standard practice for any operator, Stake defends itself when proceedings are initiated, and the courts have consistently upheld its position.”)
Cramm has also launched efforts at wider reform, with some success. Back in 2020 she lodged complaints against more than a dozen casino operators including Stake, handing Curaçao’s public prosecutor a dossier of material highlighting alleged failures to verify player identities. In July 2025 the prosecutor’s office issued a press release touting “the first time that the online gambling business on Curaçao is being held accountable.” Rather than announcing arrests or revoked licenses, though, the office said it had reached a settlement with 12 unnamed entities, fining each of them the equivalent of $12,500. For Stake, which was among the 12, according to two people with direct knowledge of the matter, the fine equaled roughly a minute and a half’s worth of gambling revenue. “This is what we call a very, very favorable investment and supervision climate,” Cramm says with a wry smile. She also managed to force an overhaul to Curaçao’s licensing system in late 2024, with the Dutch Supreme Court ruling that its unusual approach, which allowed a handful of companies holding “master licenses” to sell sublicenses to dozens of online casinos, was illegal. This forced Stake and other providers to apply for licenses directly with the regulator, rather than obtain a license through one of a handful of private companies. But from Cramm’s perspective, much remains to be done. (Representatives for the Curaçao government didn’t respond to requests for comment.)
Beyond Curaçao, regulators have largely fumbled in their efforts to rein in the offshore casino sector, outmaneuvered by nimble operators who exploit the gap between national laws and enforcement power. Stake’s prominence and antics have officials’ attention, though. Last February the UK’s Gambling Commission said Stake was “shutting down” in the country, after the commission had started investigating whether the company’s ads appealed strongly to young people and tied gambling to seduction, in violation of its licensing conditions. (Stake called the move a “strategic decision.”)
Stake’s sweepstakes model in the US—the workaround that allows users to play with virtual gold coins or Stake Cash instead of dollar-denominated crypto—hasn’t prevented lawsuits from piling up there. Los Angeles City Attorney Hydee Feldstein Soto, in announcing her office’s suit against Stake.us and related entities in September, called the sweepstakes business “a rogue and real money gambling racket with destructive repercussions for players.”
Craven continues to live the high life in Australia. He has a collection of Range Rovers, which he keeps at the most expensive mansion in Melbourne, bought in 2022 for A$80,000,088 ($56.8 million). (The number “88” is interpreted in white supremacist and internet s---posting circles to mean “Heil Hitler,” because “H” is the eighth letter in the alphabet. Craven didn’t respond to a request for comment about the sale.)
His prize influencers have mostly stayed on despite the lawsuits, with one notable exception: After Ross was named as a defendant in the California suit, he switched sponsors, signing on with Rainbet instead, for $100 million. Drake briefly stopped streaming last fall, after lashing out at Stake for allegedly not allowing him to withdraw funds, but he returned over the holidays, after offering on Instagram to share 10% of his winnings with viewers during a stream. His Kick channel description still reads, “Getting cooked by Eddie live since 2022.”
Chris, the young Swede, has had more success staying away from Stake lately. After he bypassed his permanent ban in 2022, his cycle of deposits, losses, exclusion requests and new accounts continued for another two years until November 2024, when he resolved more firmly than before to quit gambling. In the seven years since he created his first account, he’d lost about $1.5 million worth of crypto on Stake.
For a while, Chris sought out online support groups and spent time playing with his Chihuahua, Ice, contemplating what to do with his life. Unusually for an addict, he hadn’t racked up debts to feed his habit, thanks to the crypto from his Counter-Strike days. He’d also had the foresight to buy some Rolexes as assets he couldn’t easily gamble away. Even so, he’s all too aware of the opportunity costs. “If I didn’t gamble that crypto,” Chris says, “it would have been worth $15 million to $20 million by now.”
He managed to keep away from gambling for about a year but found it almost impossible to be online without seeing clips from streamers on social media. Even a popular history meme account he followed on X pumped out viral posts watermarked with the Stake logo. “There’s always that shadow reminder,” he says. Then in September he had to put down Ice, after the Chihuahua contracted leptospirosis, a bacterial infection. Once again, Chris turned to crypto gambling, this time with a different site. A few days and a few thousand dollars in, he stopped. “It didn’t feel good,” he says. He installed an app on his devices to block gambling content. Still, he says, it’s been hard to completely break free from Stake. His legal case in Curaçao is pending, and he continues to collect a few hundred dollars in affiliate income each month—a small reminder of the losses of other gamblers he once encouraged to sign up. —With Leonardo Nicoletti