Turkey detains 22 over financial support for illegal iGaming platform PEKINBET

According to investigators, the suspects handled payments on behalf of the PEKINBET platform using accounts tied to the payment service Papara. The detentions took place simultaneously across 22 provinces in Turkey, carried out by cybercrime units of the Turkish Gendarmerie.

PEKINBET, like most offshore iGaming platforms serving Turkish users, is not licensed to operate domestically. Because of that, investigations like this one tend to target local financial infrastructure — payment intermediaries and bank accounts — rather than the platform itself, which sits outside Turkish jurisdiction.

An analysis of the suspects’ bank accounts, crypto assets, and e-wallets found a financial turnover of 231.3 million Turkish lira (about $4.8 million), after which a separate cybercrime investigation was opened. Ankara prosecutors issued detention warrants for 31 suspects; 22 are currently in custody, and the search for the remaining nine continues.

This isn’t the first time Papara has surfaced in a case like this. In May 2025, Turkish authorities detained the company’s leadership, after which control passed to the state and the asset was later sold to state-owned bank Türkiye Emlak Katılım Bankası for roughly $100 million. Papara founder Ahmet Faruk Karslı is facing a separate case over alleged facilitation of illegal iGaming payments and risks up to 28 years in prison.

The same payment service turning up in case after case points to a systemic pattern in how Turkish payment infrastructure gets checked, not an isolated incident, and suggests liability for illegal iGaming payments in Turkey is increasingly extending to intermediaries, not just the platforms themselves. For operators and affiliates routing payouts through Turkish-facing payment rails, that shift adds a layer of counterparty risk that goes beyond simply checking whether a platform itself holds a license.