Declared bankrupt by a court in Curaçao, Leicester City FC sponsor BC.GAME is about to lose its licence. Josimar has discovered that the operator is running one of the largest illegal betting networks in continental Europe.
By Philippe Auclair and Steve Menary
According to a document seen by Josimar, the Curaçao Gaming Control Board (GCB) is minded to revoke the licence of Small Dance B.V., the company which operates the online sports betting, casino and crypto trading platform BC.GAME, current sponsor of Leicester City FC and partner of the Argentinian football federation AFA.
Small House B.V. was declared bankrupt by the Joint Court of Justice of Aruba, Curaçao, Sint Maarten and the BES Islands on 12 November, having failed to pay back over 2 million dollars owed to a group of five gamblers. Small House B.V. had taken over BC.GAME from another company, BlockDance B.B., on 30 April 2024. Blockdance B.V. was also declared bankrupt.
The Curaçao authority’s intention to revoke BC.GAME’s licence is a logical step in one sense: the bankruptcy order served on Small House naturally raised concerns about their ability to operate the platform within the constraints of their licence. How would they pay their customers’ winnings if they were, indeed, bankrupt?
On the other hand, despite hundreds of complaints from the general public over the years, it was virtually unknown for licensees to be struck off the register under Curaçao’s former licensing regime. It was reputed instead for its looseness and was heavily criticised both at home and abroad – especially in the Netherlands, to which the autonomous jurisdiction is still linked. The new system (National Ordinance for Games of Chance, or LOK) which is gradually taking over from the old one has proved just as controversial, which might explain why the GCB is intent to show it is not as toothless as some have said.
To quote from an address Curaçao Finance Minister Javier Silvania made to his country’s Parliament, “[Curaçao has] often been portrayed as a hub for criminal activities and money laundering, contributing to a negative image. However, this perception is set to change with the LOK (…) which will enhance our reputation by promoting transparency, accountability and compliance with international standards in these critical areas.”
But will it? It doesn’t look that way. Local politician Luigi Faneyte has just lodged a 392-page long criminal complaint against the very same Javier Silvania, accusing him of “official misconduct, corruption, fraud, embezzlement and money laundering”. Dr Faneyte claims that provisional licences were issued without legal basis and that the result has been the takeover of the Curaçao gaming industry by a trio of Maltese individuals, one of whom, Mario Fiorini, is the head of the company named as a “statutory director” of Small House B.V. in the Curaçao Commercial Register.
BC.GAME is regularly cited in Dr Faneyte’s complaint. “The GCB was used as a facade to conceal the fact that actual decision-making power and control over licensing processes were in the hands of foreign parties”, he writes, “including [Mario] GALEA, [Aideen] SHORTT and [Mario] FIORINI. The ‘front’ qualifies as a cunning trick and reinforces the suspicion of fraud. How else could anyone have missed the writing on the wall in the BC.Game case?”
“This casino offers games of chance without identifying players”, he says. “In addition, BC.Game offers the opportunity to trade in currencies, including the exchange of cryptocurrencies for US dollars. This is known as “Forex Trading”, an activity for which a separate financial license is required. However, it seems highly unlikely that BC.Game holds such a license”.
There would be a precedent for BC.GAME being stripped of their – gambling – licence. One of the ‘new’ licensees, Rabidi N.V., known to operate a number of illegal casinos in Europe, was also declared bankrupt after a gambler was denied winnings of almost 250,000 euro. Rabidi N.V. subsequently had its licence revoked by the GCB, in a case with strong echoes of BC.GAME’s own.
Josimar understands that a special hearing is set to take place this Friday, when the Managing Director of the GCB Cedric Pietersz will meet up with the newly-appointed trustee of Small House B.V., local attorney-at-law Barbara Nagelmackers, to discuss the decision. It is unclear at this stage whether Small House B.V. will be able to have a legal representative present at the meeting, as seems to have been the original plan.
One of the many mysteries surrounding BC.GAME is whom exactly this legal representative would be speaking for, as the identity of the ultimate beneficial owners of BC.GAME is only known to themselves. All the evidence collected by Josimar points to the Far East, with Taiwan and Singapore two likely hubs of the company. As stated above, the Curaçao Commercial Register names a company called IGA Trust B.V. as “managing director” of the company.
Small House B.V.’s entry in the Curaçao Commercial Register
IGA Trust B.V. is a recently set up affiliate of the IGA (for ‘iGaming’) Group, a Malta-based corporate services company focusing on the gambling industry, which was founded in 2017 and is run by the above-mentioned Mario Fiorini, whom Dr Faneyte accuses of “collaborating and/or conspiring with others, whether or not in the form of participation in a criminal organization”. Fiorini also controls three companies in Cyprus, IGA Corp Services (CY) Ltd, IGA Advisors (CY) Ltd and IGAML. Mr Fiorini was contacted for comment.
Mario Fiorini, founder and CEO of the IGA Group.
Biggest illegal casino in Europe?
We explained in our first piece about BC.GAME how the operator had set up a web page which enabled customers based in Germany to circumvent local regulations and access their main site. As neither BC.GAME nor any of its 130+ mirror sites are licensed there, this automatically makes them an illegal platform as per the definition of the Macolin Convention and the criteria of the World Lottery Association. What goes for Germany also goes for the rest of continental Europe. BC.GAME is unlicensed throughout the region, and any platform which would target European nationals in their country of residence would be, by definition, illegal.
Yet Josimar has established that BC.GAME has set up a series of web pages which are specifically aimed at players from every European jurisdiction we have looked at. These web pages act as bridges, or springboards, giving step-by-step instructions to would-be customers, in their native language, so they can access the illegal online casino. Some lead directly to the platform, when the local regulators have not put geo-blocking in place (this is true of Denmark, Finland and Switzerland, for example). Others use a more sophisticated method, as we will see.
This trick is commonly used by illegal operators. Josimar has highlighted in the past how Russian-Cypriot 1xBet had produced an online guide to show sports fans how to bet in countries where sports betting is illegal or where they don’t have a licence, for example. In parallel, a degree of caution must be exercised before jumping to conclusions. Rogue operators and scammers are known to impersonate well-known gambling brands in order to hoover personal data from credulous customers or to direct them to other illegal casinos. But this is not true in this case.
Josimar simply keyed in “how can I place a bet on BC.GAME from [name of country]” in a search engine, formulating that query in the language of the country in question, having first used a VPN to locate ourselves there. Every single search proved successful. Some examples are seen below.
Spain
France
Italy
Portugal, where a Brazilian ‘football journalist’ called “Leonardo Fernandes Silva”, whom Josimar has been unable to trace, is claimed to have written the BC.GAME cheat guide.
Greece, where BC.GAME is not just unlicensed, but also black-listed.
Bulgaria, where BC.GAME is also black-listed.
The customer who clicks on the Login/Sign-up button will sometimes (but not always) land on a page which displays the following message. “As per gaming licence norms, we are unable to accept players from your region”. It appears that BC.GAME conforms to local regulations after all.
But this is not the end of the road. Simply clicking on the ‘x’ at the top of the pop-up window closes it and unlocks the website.
Is it possible to sign up? Absolutely. The site appears to be fully operational.
Should that elementary routine fail, BC.GAME has useful tips for its customers: go to our mirror websites, which might not be blocked; or use a VPN.
BC.GAME’s own forum also addresses the question.
So, licence or no licence, accessing the BC.GAME platforms is not a problem for their European customers. For these players, the real problem is elsewhere: being able to access their money.
Complaints galore
Regulators continue to blacklist the site with Belgium’s Gaming Commision banning BC.GAME and a number of their mirror websites only last week.
While some countries are only just catching onto the problems created by the company, the sheer scale of BC.GAME’s regulatory infractions and dire reputation among customers was well established long before Leicester City agreed their shirt sponsorship this summer.
In July 2023, BC.GAME was one of the URLs for illegal betting websites the British Gambling Commission asked Google to block in its territory. The Greek Gaming Commission made a similar request including BC.GAME in May 2023 after launching an online service allowing people to provide evidence of illegal operators. A number of BC.GAME sites are now on a blacklist in Greece, including BC.Fun, whose owner is listed on the GGC blacklist as Small House, along with BC.GAME, BC.Online and BC.Gametop, all of whose owner or owners had not been identified. BC.Game was also placed on a blacklist in Lithuania in February 2023 and in Bulgaria two months later.
In May 2022, evidence surfaced of BC.GAME using pornographic imagery in another request from the Netherlands. The owner of an Only Fans account, Brenda T. Matter, submitted a request claiming that 26 websites – all containing adult imagery – were using photos and videos she had created for her Only Fans website.
The UK rating of BC.GAME on website TrustPilot has been suspended for breaching the website’s guidelines after a number of (positive) reviews were discovered to be fake.
The internet is awash with customers complaining about poor customer service and alleging they have been cheated by BC.GAME. There are complaints on AskGamblers.com and Casino Meister and the forum, Bit Coin Talk. Some BC.GAME customers are likely complaining after a loss, but many cite issues around withdrawing winnings, which was the basis of the successful claim for bankruptcy against BC.GAME in Curacao by SBGOK. One complaint on CasinoGuru claims that the company only initiates Know Your Customer (KYC) processes after players try to withdraw their winnings, which has allowed under-age gamblers to use the website.
The complicity of football and the industries that surround it in this debacle is staggering. A review on a popular football website posted on 14 November 2024 even rated BC.GAME as 9.5 out of 10 for safety and reliability.
Josimar asked Leicester City if the club would continue to advertise a website declared bankrupt for non-payment of customers and blacklisted in multiple countries on its shirts in its next Premier League fixtures away to Brentford, or if BC.GAME would be removed. We received no reply. Towards the end of the 2019/20 season, AFC Bournemouth removed MansionBet subsidiary M88 from its shirts for the last few games after regulatory problems were unearthed.