The Istanbul Prosecutor's Office has prepared an indictment against 57 suspects related to the Maltese payment service Paymix, according to Anadolu Agency. The investigation claims that illegal iGaming operators processed transactions amounting to $4.44 billion through this service.
The prosecution is seeking prison sentences ranging from 16 years and 6 months to 39 years for Burak Bashel, the founder of Basel Holding, as the organizer of a criminal organization. Other defendants face sentences between 6 and 37 years.
According to the indictment, revenues from illegal gambling and fraud were funneled through payment services and electronic money issuers into the banking system. Subsequently, the suspects converted these funds into crypto assets and transferred them to wallets on the Kraken exchange, registered in the British Virgin Islands.
Burak Bashel owns 90% of Paymix and holds the largest share in Pronet Gaming, a platform solutions provider that supported the technical infrastructure for these operators. The prosecutor's office discovered 56 websites of unlicensed operators on the IT company Pentech's infrastructure, containing data from 14 million players. The community utilized over 500 servers, around 800 VPN accounts, and 60 control panels.