Stake Nigeria Ban: Regulators Go After the Payment Rails

Lagos cannot switch off a Curaçao casino. It can lean on the fintechs that move naira into one, which is why the Stake Nigeria ban announced on September 10 names banks, payment providers, advertisers and influencers before it mentions players. By September 11, Nigerian bettors on X were reporting that OPay had disappeared from Stake’s deposit menu.

What the regulators actually said

On September 10 the Lagos State Lotteries and Gaming Authority (LSLGA), acting with the Federation of State Gaming Regulators of Nigeria (FSGRN), declared Stake.com an unlicensed and illegal gaming operator in Lagos and, according to the notice, across the federation’s 24 member states. The notice circulated through the authority’s LinkedIn page and the trade press. As of September 12 it had not appeared on the authority’s website, and industry reports have put FSGRN membership at 22 states, so the 24 figure is the regulators’ own count.

The allegation is narrow. “Stake has failed to register, declare or remit applicable monthly gaming taxes and levies despite receiving no fewer than 10 formal compliance notices over the past two years,” the LSLGA said in the statement quoted by SBC News. The regulators say Stake holds no license from Lagos or from any member state, and the operator sits at entry 17 on the authority’s standing List of Illegal Gaming Companies in Lagos State, recorded under the company name Medium Rara NV. Stake’s site names its operator as Medium Rare N.V., a Curaçao company licensed by the Curaçao Gaming Authority, according to iGaming Expert.

The enforcement language is what separates this notice from the register entry. LSLGA and FSGRN said they are pursuing action against Stake, its directors and “any payment companies, financial institutions, advertising platforms, influencers or other entities found to be facilitating its operations.” The statement continued: “Banks, payment service providers, fintech companies, media organisations and digital advertising platforms are also urged to conduct appropriate due diligence and cease facilitating unlicensed gaming activities.”

Cross River State followed on September 11. A public notice signed by Michael Eja, Director-General of the Cross River State Lotteries and Gaming Agency, and published on the state government’s news site, repeated the ten-notice allegation, cited the same Supreme Court judgment and urged the public to “discontinue wagering on Stake.com” and patronize only state-licensed operators.

“LSLGA and FSGRN remain committed to protecting Nigerian consumers, safeguarding minors, preserving market integrity and ensuring that gaming operators comply fully with applicable State laws and tax obligations.”

— Lagos State Lotteries and Gaming Authority, statement of September 10, 2026, as quoted by SBC News

Two years from judgment to notice

The notices rest on Attorney-General of Lagos State & Ors v. Attorney-General of the Federation & Ors (SC/1/2008), decided by a seven-justice panel of the Supreme Court of Nigeria on November 22, 2024. The court held that the National Lottery Act 2005 is unenforceable in every state except the Federal Capital Territory, because lotteries, betting and gaming are residual matters reserved for the states. The federal National Lottery Regulatory Commission, whose license many operators had relied on nationwide, lost that authority in a single ruling.

The states moved quickly. Six days later the FSGRN met in Lagos with representatives from 24 member states and switched on its Universal Reciprocity License regime on December 1. In May 2025 the member states signed a Sub-national Reciprocity Licensing Framework under which one Universal Reciprocity Certificate authorizes operations across every member state. From January 1, 2026, operators pay a flat 11% contribution on gross gaming revenue and a ₦100 million annual license fee per category, must geo-fence and geo-track their players, and owe back taxes to November 2024.

A federal counter-move failed. The National Assembly passed a Central Gaming Bill in December 2025; President Bola Tinubu declined to sign it, and LSLGA chief executive Bashir Are, who chairs the FSGRN, published an essay defending that decision in January. Lagos has since added a 5% withholding tax on player winnings at every Lagos-licensed platform, in force since February 2026, according to iGB.

Why go after the rails

A Lagos listing on its own has a poor record. The authority’s earlier public list of 37 unlicensed operators, still on its website, named 22Bet and Bet365 among others; Stake was not on it. Sahara Reporters found in July that of 45 companies Lagos declared illegal in September 2025, at least 30 still ran Facebook or Instagram pages in May 2026 with more than 200,000 combined followers, Stake.com among them, and the authority’s legal officer did not answer the paper’s questions about enforcement.

Regulators know the limits. “Sometimes regulators simply lack the power to do more than collect fees and write letters,” Fisayo Oke, chief executive of Gamble Alert and formerly head of operations at the Oyo State Gaming Board, told iGaming Future in August. He put the number of states with “something quite solid in terms of regulation” at six to eight out of 36 plus the FCT. The same report recorded an unresolved question raised by operators: the Supreme Court empowered states, not a federation of them, and no court has tested what the FSGRN as a body can issue or enforce.

What is new in 2026 is the toolkit. Lagos High Court judgments this year, summarized in an LSLGA public notice, held that “Operators cannot bypass Lagos laws by locating administrative offices or servers outside the state. Acceptance of wagers from Lagos residents establishes full regulatory jurisdiction.” The court fined Mozzartbet Services ₦500,000, issued perpetual injunctions against non-compliant operators and, per the notice, cleared the way to prosecution under Section 85 of the LSLGA Law 2021. On July 20 the authority ordered a registry census of operators, platform providers and payment service providers, with payment gateways to be submitted for technical audit under a six-month roadmap. Cross River says its 2025 gaming law and its onboarding by Google let it strike at distribution rather than at servers.

“With Google’s onboarding, the Agency can now demand the removal of illegal operators’ content from Google platforms, block their advertisements, and pursue legal action against them.”

— Michael Eja, Director-General, Cross River State Lotteries and Gaming Agency, October 2025

The design will look familiar to readers of our coverage of the Florida sweepstakes lawsuits that went after payment processors: when the operator is out of reach, name the parties that are not. Nigerian bettors fund accounts through domestic bank transfers, wallets and payment gateways, and those are the firms the notice asks to run due diligence. Every one of them is easier to reach than a company in Curaçao.

What changed on the cashier

Stake has said nothing. Its X account has not addressed the notices, iGaming Expert said it had asked the company for comment, and the site remained reachable from Nigeria when the declaration was reported, according to The Straight and iGaming Expert. Neither regulator posted the notice on X either. The first two days of the story played out in trade headlines and in players’ replies.

Players did the talking. On September 11 several Nigerian users posted that OPay had disappeared from Stake’s naira deposit options. One, posting as @Nwaachinemere1, wrote that Stake had removed OPay from its list of deposit banks; another said only PalmPay and Skrill still worked; a third said the cashier was now prompting for dollars or crypto. Others reported the opposite, including a working bank-transfer portal and a reply under a tipster’s thread insisting deposits went through with PalmPay. Similar deposit complaints appeared in late August, before any notice, so the OPay change may be a processor decision rather than a regulator-driven block. No bank or fintech has said anything publicly.

The promoter machine did not pause. The account @Mrbankstips, a Nigerian tipster who posts Stake betting slips and a signup link, put out weekend slips on the morning of September 11 to roughly 933,000 views, claimed a $114,000 Stake win on the evening of the notice, and told a skeptic that Stake would pay. None of the three posts mentioned the regulators. TVC News’s post on the Cross River notice, the most-viewed regulator-side item found, showed about 2,600 views. The figures are X’s own displayed counts and are approximate.

That gap is the influencer problem the notice names. Stake’s most prominent Nigerian face is Davido, whom the company appointed as its global ambassador in 2025 under a year-long deal, according to Focus Gaming News. Entain’s June research into UK-facing promotion listed Stake alongside Rainbet and Duelbits among more than 30 unregulated sites pushed through influencers; Rainbet sits at entry 41 on the same Lagos register as Stake.

How big Stake is in Nigeria

Semrush’s traffic ranking for July 2026 puts stake.com third among gambling websites visited from Nigeria, with 8.87 million visits, behind SportyBet at 36.28 million and Bet9ja at 11.61 million. SBC News, citing the Blask Index, describes Nigeria as Africa’s second-largest betting market after South Africa, with a competitive earnings baseline of $789 million, and ranks Stake as the country’s 13th-largest operator despite holding no license there. Industry estimates cited by iGaming Future put the number of Nigerians who bet at around 60 million.

Those are visits, not deposits, and Semrush measures traffic rather than money. What the numbers establish is that Stake is not a fringe site in Nigeria. It is the third-most-visited gambling brand in a market the regulators now say it has served for at least two years without a license. The company’s own scale is covered in our summary of Stake’s 2025 statistics.

A regulated pivot everywhere except here

The Nigerian notices land on a company that has spent 2026 buying licenses. Stake launched in Denmark on March 1 under a five-year license, according to iGB, and SBC News notes new licenses in Argentina and Mexico this year. The contrast is the UK, which it left under pressure. The Gambling Commission announced on February 12, 2025 that Stake’s GB site would close by March 11 after the regulator opened an investigation into a Stake-branded promotional video, and TGP Europe, the white-label firm that had held Stake’s GB license, surrendered it on May 16, 2025 when the regulator told it a £3.3 million penalty and extensive compliance changes would be required to stay.

“This case involves a gambling company that was unwilling or unable to meet regulatory standards we expect from licensees. It is right they have exited the British market.”

— John Pierce, Head of Enforcement, UK Gambling Commission, May 16, 2025

In the United States, the class action tying Stake.us to Drake was sent to private arbitration in July, as we reported in our account of the Stake Drake lawsuit. Nigeria is the first market this year where a regulator has moved from listing Stake to naming the companies that keep it funded.

The second front: Everton and the UK sponsorship ban

Stake still advertises in Britain through Everton. After four seasons on the front of the shirt, the club and the operator announced a multi-year sleeve deal on June 30, with branding across Hill Dickinson Stadium, Goodison Park and Finch Farm, as the Premier League’s front-of-shirt gambling ban took effect for 2026/27. “Our partnership with Everton has been an important and successful one, and we are proud to continue our relationship with one of English football’s most historic and globally recognised clubs,” Stake chief marketing officer Akhil Sarin said in the statement reported by Gaming Intelligence.

The Department for Culture, Media and Sport ran a consultation from July 15 to September 9 on banning sponsorship and advertising by operators not licensed by the Gambling Commission. The proposal uses secondary legislation under section 328 of the Gambling Act 2005 to make it a criminal offence for any club, league, event or venue to be sponsored by an unlicensed operator. Two options are on the table: a fixed start in August 2027, or a phased approach that lets existing contracts run until August 2028. DCMS says about 40% of Premier League clubs had unlicensed gambling deals in 2025/26; The Straight and Yogonet put the current figure at half of the 20 clubs, and Yogonet reported that gambling minister Vicky Foxcroft has told operators the ban is intended for next year. Whether Everton’s contract would be allowed to run to expiry is undecided.

Entain, which wants an immediate ban, framed the case in July. “Unlicensed gambling operators are often little more than fronts for organised crime. They target vulnerable consumers, pay no UK tax, and ignore safeguards licensed operators must provide,” chief executive Stella David said. Yield Sec data reported by NEXT.io puts the UK’s illegal online market at 9% of the total, worth £379 million in the first half of 2025, up from 0.43% in 2020; the global picture is in our report on how much online gambling sits outside any regulator. The Nigerian and UK tracks are separate processes with separate legal bases. They share only a target.

What Nigerian players should know

Nothing in either notice describes an offence by players. Section 33(3) of the LSLGA Law 2021 provides that “a person without a subsisting licence or authorization from the Authority shall not conduct or operate any gaming activity in the State”, and the enforcement list runs to operators, directors and facilitators. The public is advised to stop, not threatened.

Funds are a different matter. No regulator has issued guidance on balances held with Stake, Stake has not commented, and withdrawal reports on X cut both ways. The 22Bet precedent suggests a listing alone does not close a cashier: the brand has appeared on Lagos’s unlicensed lists since the authority’s earlier 37-name notice, and its Nigerian X account was still promoting naira deposits on September 3. This notice is the first to name the payment rails, and OPay’s reported disappearance is the first sign that naming them can bite. A player moving to a state-licensed platform should expect a 5% withholding deduction on winnings at Lagos-licensed operators, and can check any operator’s status with our guide to verifying a casino license.

FAQs

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Sources

• Cross River Declares Stake.com Unlicensed, Orders Public to Stop Wagering — Cross River State Government, Ministry of Information
• List of Illegal Gaming Companies in Lagos State — Lagos State Lotteries and Gaming Authority
• Lagos Unlicensed Gaming Operators (37-name notice) — Lagos State Lotteries and Gaming Authority
• Public Notice: High Court Judgments Reaffirm Statutory Mandate — Lagos State Lotteries and Gaming Authority
• Official Public Notice to All Licensed Gaming Operators, B2B Providers, and Financial Partners — Lagos State Lotteries and Gaming Authority
• FSGRN Meets to Discuss Supreme Court Judgment Affirming State Jurisdiction over Gaming Regulation — Lagos State Lotteries and Gaming Authority / FSGRN
• The Central Gaming Bill — Federation of State Gaming Regulators of Nigeria (essay by Chairman Bashir Are)
• Consultation on banning unlicensed gambling sponsorship — Department for Culture, Media and Sport (GOV.UK)
• TGP Europe leaves GB market following Commission investigation — UK Gambling Commission
• Consumer information notice: Stake leaving GB market — UK Gambling Commission
• Everton & Stake Extend Partnership With Official Sleeve Agreement — Everton Football Club
• Entain welcomes the Government consultation and calls for an immediate ban on unlicensed gambling sponsorships — Entain
• Revealed: sophisticated network driving illegal gambling promotion across UK social media — Entain