Turkey’s interior minister has cast illegal betting as more than a policing problem, saying it has become a direct national security issue and a major conduit for money laundering. Mustafa Çiftçi said digital payments and cryptocurrencies have transformed illegal betting into a major conduit for money laundering, while casinos, junkets and underground banking sit inside the wider laundering network.
Habertürk reported that Çiftçi put the annual cost of illegal gambling to Turkey at $40 billion. He also said the state now has the capacity to see, analyse and respond to the threat, using AI-supported monitoring and big-data tools against what he described as a constantly evolving network.
The remarks came against a legal backdrop in which Turkey runs an online gambling monopoly through the National Lottery Administration and İddaa under Spor Toto. Law No. 7258 criminalises operating or enabling gambling without a licence, and reporting on the law has noted that gambling offences are often paired with money-laundering and fraud charges.
The scale of enforcement is large. Authorities blocked 548,420 illegal betting and gambling websites between 2006 and 2025, including 84,585 in 2025 alone, and disabled 12,548 servers and connection addresses. Daily Sabah, citing the National Lottery Administration, gave a slightly different lifetime tally, saying officials had identified 556,818 illegal gambling websites and blocked access to 533,261 of them.
Investigators have also moved into payment flows. Habertürk reported that the Istanbul Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office, MASAK and the Central Bank found 26,012 accounts on a fintech platform were used across 102 illegal betting sites, with transactions said to exceed 12.9 billion lira and the judicial process still pending.
The crackdown has reached social media and payment intermediaries too. Daily Sabah said 3,021 social-media accounts were targeted for restriction from 2025, 2,105 were blocked, and another 261 were reported to the Advertising Board and then blocked. Authorities also acted against 11 payment and electronic money institutions, identified 26 mobile apps carrying illegal gambling content, and blocked 1,902 streaming websites that advertised or redirected users to betting platforms.
The government has presented the fight as part of a wider struggle against organised crime. Habertürk said Çiftçi linked illegal betting crews to international organised crime groups, and said drug-trafficking, human-trafficking and weapons-trade profits are laundered through digital betting channels. It also cited Chainalysis data showing $154 billion was transferred to illegal crypto addresses in 2025, up 162% from the previous year, with stablecoins accounting for 84% of the total.
A May 2025 typology paper from the Isle of Man Financial Intelligence Unit said online gambling businesses are vulnerable because they support cryptocurrency payments, handle high-speed cross-border transactions and can be paired with crypto mixers, bridges and peer-to-peer exchanges to obscure illicit funds. Turkishminute separately reported that MASAK’s 2025 activity report completed 502 analysis files on illegal betting, sent 545 intelligence reports to relevant institutions and suspended 5.1 billion lira in transactions linked to suspected organisers.
