MyStake

The group behind MyStake

MyStake is the flagship brand of a group historically incorporated in Curacao as Santeda International B.V. (registration 151296), the company behind a family of sites that includes Velobet, Goldenbet, Cosmobet, Rolletto and Donbet, which share infrastructure and broadly similar terms. MyStake's own certificate of operation is now carried under Curacao Gaming Authority licence OGL/2024/250/0115, held by GTW B.V., the entity the group's brands were moved to from Santeda across 2025 and 2026; reporting records the earlier Santeda licence as expired pending renewal, which under Curacao practice permits continued operation. Because the brands sit on one corporate spine, a pattern experienced at one site is frequently mirrored at its siblings, which matters when assessing how a dispute is likely to run.

Licence and UK position

A Curacao Gaming Authority licence is the only gaming authorisation MyStake points to. Neither MyStake, Santeda nor GTW B.V. appears on the UK Gambling Commission's public register, and the group's own terms name the United Kingdom as a restricted territory. That has two consequences for a UK player. GamStop cannot block the site, because GamStop reaches only UK-licensed operators, and none of the UK's dispute machinery, from approved ADR providers to Commission oversight, applies to the operator. In 2022 Spain's gambling regulator, the DGOJ, fined Santeda International B.V. five million euros and imposed a two-year ban for unlicensed activity in the Spanish market, a primary regulator action that shows how the group has operated into markets where it held no local permission.

The GAMRS allegations

In December 2025 GamblingNews reported research by GAMRS, an independent monitoring body, which alleged that the Santeda brands together form a black-market network turning over more than two billion pounds a year. The report attributed roughly 1.2 billion pounds of annual turnover to MyStake alone and estimated that UK players account for 64.8 per cent of its traffic, a striking concentration for a site whose terms restrict the UK. It also carried customer testimony gathered across the network, including a GamStop-registered individual who reported losing around 49,300 pounds over three days after receiving offers linked to the group's brands. These figures and accounts are third-party research and testimony reported by the press, not a regulator's findings or a court judgment, and this file presents them strictly as allegations.

If you self-excluded and still lost money at MyStake

Some of the strongest files this office sees start here: a person registered with GamStop to stop themselves playing, and an offshore site still took their deposits. GamStop's own About page, read on 16 September 2026, states that registering blocks you from accessing gambling websites and apps licensed in Great Britain, and that is the whole of its reach. MyStake is not licensed in Great Britain, so the scheme never touched it. That is a gap in the protection you were given rather than a failing on your part, and it is worth saying plainly because the opposite assumption is what stops people looking at their options.

The GAMRS research reported by GamblingNews in December 2025 carried testimony from a GamStop-registered individual who described losing around 49,300 pounds over three days across the group's brands after continuing to receive offers, and it estimated that players in the United Kingdom made up 64.8 per cent of MyStake's traffic while the brand's own terms name the United Kingdom as restricted. That is third-party research and reported testimony, not a regulator's finding, and this file records it as such. What it points at is the question a self-exclusion case actually turns on: not whether you should have played, but what the operator knew, what marketing it sent, whether it was serving a market its own terms excluded, and what its licence required of it while it did. Those are answerable questions, and the answers live in your account records and your inbox rather than in the scheme's database.

The evidence to keep, and the routes you can use yourself

Before anything else, stop depositing and build the record while it is still reachable. Export or screenshot the full account history with dates and amounts, every withdrawal request and what happened to it, and the balance as it stands now. Save the whole thread with support, including the exact wording of any document request, any reason given for a hold, and any clause the operator quoted at you. Keep the marketing you received, emails, texts and push offers, with their dates, because on a self-exclusion file the marketing timeline is often the most probative thing in the bundle. Keep your own payment records too: they establish what went in and when, independently of anything the operator later says about your account.

Then use the free routes first, in writing. A complaint goes to MyStake itself, through the channel its site publishes, dated and naming the specific clause or decision you are disputing, with every reply kept. You do not need anyone's help to do that, and a complaint made properly is worth more later than a chat transcript. What the UK framework does not give you here is the next rung: because neither MyStake nor GTW B.V. appears on the Gambling Commission's public register, there is no approved adjudicator to escalate to and no Commission file to open, so the escalation that exists runs through the Curaçao licence the operator holds. That is the point at which people reasonably ask whether a structured claim is worth pursuing, and it is a question about evidence and merit rather than about the size of the loss.

If you are in the United States

No state regulator can take up a MyStake dispute, because MyStake holds no state licence and online gambling in the United States is regulated state by state, which leaves the MyStake account outside every state system. The August 2025 letter from 50 state attorneys general asked the Department of Justice to pursue injunctions, seize domains and work with payment processors against offshore sites such as MyStake; useful pressure, but not a refund route for a MyStake player. Log the MyStake dispute with your state attorney general or consumer protection office, then pursue the Curaçao route above against MyStake.

If you are in the EU

Whether an EU player has a domestic claim against MyStake depends on the country. In Austria the position on an operator like MyStake is settled: the OGH in 1 Ob 229/20p held that a provider without an Austrian concession acts unlawfully, its contracts are ineffective and the player is entitled to repayment of the stake, so an Austrian MyStake player has a recognised route. In Germany the Court of Justice of the EU (Case C-440/23, 16 April 2026) confirmed that EU law does not prevent a restitution claim for stakes lost with MyStake on games prohibited in the player’s home state, though that ruling concerned Malta-licensed operators rather than MyStake and the BGH’s lead decision (I ZR 216/25, hearing 17 September 2026) is pending, so a German MyStake claim is not yet settled law. The Dutch Supreme Court ruled on 3 July 2026 that contracts with an unlicensed operator such as MyStake are not automatically void, so a Dutch MyStake player has no automatic refund, only a possible claim against MyStake for mistake or in tort. For every other EU country the sourced route against MyStake is the Curaçao route above, the one attached to the MyStake licence.

If you are in Canada or Australia

From Canada or Australia the route against MyStake is the same offshore one, because the domestic bodies say so themselves. The AGCO in Ontario cannot get your money back and only assists with disputes about regulated sites, so not with MyStake; iGaming Ontario cannot settle bets, refund wagers or award compensation and has no legal relationship with unregulated operators such as MyStake; and the other provinces, which run government monopolies, give no route we could source against MyStake. In Australia the Interactive Gambling Act 2001 bans online casinos, ACMA accepts complaints about breaches, and it warns that Australian regulators cannot help if an illegal service withholds your winnings. Against MyStake, pursue the Curaçao route above.

If you are in the UK

In Great Britain any operator serving consumers needs a Gambling Commission operating licence regardless of where it is based, and MyStake does not hold one, so nothing in that framework binds MyStake. The consequences for a MyStake player are practical: GAMSTOP only covers GB-licensed operators, so a self-exclusion did not block MyStake; the ADR duty in the Commission’s licence conditions binds Commission licensees only, which does not include MyStake, and IBAS adjudicates only against operators registered with it, so no UK adjudicator can hear a MyStake dispute; and the Commission itself says it has no power to resolve individual complaints or recover money from MyStake, though it takes reports of unlicensed sites at intelligencereports@gamblingcommission.gov.uk. The route that does reach MyStake is the Curaçao route above, the one attached to the MyStake licence.