Lucky Player

What is Lucky Player?

Over 100 officers participated in the operation. Authorities seized several high-value vehicles, froze numerous bank accounts and imposed an asset restraint order valued at around €82 million. An arrest warrant was also executed.

Prosecutors allege that five suspects had operated internet-based gambling services without the required German licences from at least July 2021. The volume of bets placed on these platforms reportedly exceeded €5.8 billion between mid-2021 and the end of 2023. 

In addition to illegal gambling, investigators suspect extensive tax evasion, with a projected tax shortfall of about €77.6 million for 2024.

About Lucky Player

For Ramiro Atucha, founder and CEO of Atucha Strategic Advisory, whether international operators can press home their scalable advantages will depend on how seriously they take localisation.

“When we talk about localisation, we’re not talking about the language or doing a game about Machu Picchu,” he tells iGB. “We’re talking about taking the effort to understand what the history of those players is, what they’re used to.

“I always found it funny when Colombia was starting, operators were saying ‘players here do not like slots’, as if they have a different DNA. Five years later, they would say, ‘well, they do like slots, but simple slots’. And five years later, they were playing all the usual [slots]. It’s not that they didn’t like slots.

About Lucky Player

Yashin had spent around 15 years building businesses across industries ranging from fashion technology and retail hardware to sneaker cleaning, as well as investing in early-stage technology companies. Yet when he attempted to place a football bet, he found the interface so impenetrable that he eventually headed to a betting shop to ask how to do it.

When he subsequently looked at casino games, something else struck him – the experience did not seem dramatically different from the slot machines he remembered seeing years earlier.

“I started thinking about how to combine the really great monetisation of randomness in casino games with the attention loop of social media platforms,” Yashin says. “The idea was: what if you could bet on the result of a short video or a short TikTok?”