Curaçao, a Dutch Caribbean island of just 160,000 people, has more than 8,000 licensed casino domains. Over the past two decades, it has transformed into a global gambling hub—issuing international online gambling licenses that have not been officially recognized by almost any other government in the world. Those licenses do not even authorize their holders to offer gambling services legally in Curaçao itself. Yet they have helped fuel an illegal iGaming market worth billions around the world.
Those licenses are issued by the Curaçao Gaming Authority (CGA). After all other journalistic methods for obtaining this information had been exhausted, data was extracted from the authority's internal IT systems on the basis of an overriding public interest. An international consortium of journalists subsequently gained unprecedented access to its inner workings. For the first time, the leaked data offers a detailed look at the CGA, the offshore management companies operating behind the licenses, and the iGaming companies themselves.
