For most of gambling's regulated history, the buck stopped with the company. Operators faced fines, licence suspensions and revocations. Regulators pursued corporate entities. Directors, executives and managing directors largely operated behind the protective shield of limited liability – uncomfortable, perhaps, when things went wrong, but rarely personally exposed.
That orthodoxy is now under serious pressure.
Across Europe and beyond, a cluster of rulings, legislative proposals and enforcement actions in the opening months of 2026 suggests something is shifting. Whether it constitutes a genuine "new vogue," or simply a series of isolated developments being stitched together into a narrative, is a question worth examining closely…
How did we get here? The history of gambling liability
Historically, gambling regulation has operated almost entirely on a corporate-liability basis. Regulators treated operators as the relevant legal and compliance entities – the bodies to be licensed, fined, sanctioned and, if necessary, stripped of their permissions.
Executives could certainly suffer reputational damage or, in extreme cases, face criminal prosecution for fraud or money laundering, but most enforcement mechanisms centred firmly on companies themselves.
That framework reflected the practical realities of how gambling businesses are typically structured: highly capitalised corporate operations with shareholders, compliance departments and multiple licensing entities across jurisdictions.
The "corporate veil" generally insulated directors from personal exposure unless serious misconduct could be proven.
This is not, however, a static model across all industries. In the aftermath of the global financial crisis, sectors such as banking and financial services adopted "individual accountability" frameworks – the UK's Senior Managers and Certification Regime being the most prominent example – aimed squarely at senior decision-makers rather than institutions alone.
Gambling may now be moving in a similar direction, albeit through different mechanisms and with considerably more legal complexity.
Two tracks, one direction
What makes the current moment interesting is that individual accountability is being pursued along two very different tracks simultaneously: against the executives who run unlicensed operations, and against the players who use them. On the surface, these are distinct legal questions. In practice, they point toward a common instinct – that the corporate or anonymous veil has been an overly convenient hiding place for too long.
On the executive side, the landmark event was the European Court of Justice's January 2026 ruling in Wunner (Case C‑77/24). The case was based on an Austrian consumer who had lost nearly €20,000 ($23,300) gambling on an online casino operated by Titanium Brace Marketing, a Maltese-registered company holding a Maltese licence – but not the Austrian licence required to lawfully serve Austrian players.
Rather than sue the company (by then bankrupt), the player sued its managing directors personally, in Austrian courts, under Austrian tort law.
The ECJ's ruling did not determine whether the directors were actually liable. What it decided – crucially – was that such claims fall within the scope of the Rome II Regulation, and that the applicable law is the law of the player's country of habitual residence.
Directors now face a world in which they must consider not only regulatory sanctions against their businesses, but also personal exposure in foreign courts, under foreign law, before foreign judges
In other words: if you directed an unlicensed operation targeting German players, German tort law applies to any personal claim against you. If you targeted Austrians, Austrian law applies.
Therefore, the corporate and jurisdictional distance that directors of Malta-licensed operators long relied upon no longer provides automatic insulation.
Legal commentators at DLA Piper described the ruling as having "profound consequences for director liability in the online gambling sector," noting that it "confirms that players may generally rely on the law of the Member State in which that player is habitually resident when seeking to establish tort liability against directors of foreign operators lacking the required local licence."
Camilleri Preziosi, a Maltese law firm, went further, warning that directors can face personal liability “without establishing fraud, bad faith, or abuse of corporate form, across 27 different national tort law regimes.”
The legal door is open – but how wide?
Before the alarm bells ring too loudly in executive suites, it is worth noting what Wunner did not do. National courts still decide actual liability. And the early signals from Germany are instructive: on 28 January 2026, Dresden's Regional Court dismissed a player's claim against a managing director, ruling that the position of MD alone creates no obligation toward players, and that piercing the corporate veil requires particularly reprehensible conduct – not merely a regulatory breach.
A director who genuinely believed a Maltese EU licence was sufficient, and who could point to years of legal uncertainty and pending ECJ references on the same question, was not deemed to have acted immorally.
Gaming law expert István Cocron, who has handled thousands of European gambling cases, acknowledges the nuance. "It is definitely a shift towards personal liability for directors of unlicensed online gambling businesses," he told Global Gaming Insider. But he also concedes the practical obstacles: black-market operators are skilled at concealing directors, German law requires full names and addresses before suits can be filed, and enforcement against those who do lose in court has been complicated by Malta's controversial Bill 55 – a 2023 law that instructs Maltese courts to disregard foreign judgments against MGA-licensed operators, on public-policy grounds.
The European Commission has launched infringement proceedings against the measure, and the ECJ Advocate General has signalled it is incompatible with EU enforcement rules, but the legal battle remains live.
Nevertheless, even if most claims ultimately fail on the merits, the mere possibility of personal litigation changes executive risk calculations dramatically. Directors now face a world in which they must consider not only regulatory sanctions against their businesses, but also personal exposure in foreign courts – under foreign law, before foreign judges.
That prospect alone is likely to influence governance decisions, jurisdictional strategy and the appetite for operating in grey-market territories.
Critics argue that the Bill 55 measure fundamentally undermines cross-border judicial cooperation within the EU, while supporters claim it protects the free movement of services that lies at the heart of European law.
In that sense, the Bill 55 dispute has become symbolic of a wider and unresolved struggle over who controls gambling regulation in Europe: national governments asserting sovereign authority over consumer protection, or the principles of the EU single market.
In any case, with all these elements in mind, the current picture on executive liability is this: the legal avenue now clearly exists; the practical hurdles are significant; and early German jurisprudence suggests courts will apply high standards before piercing the corporate veil.
It is a shift in the legal landscape for sure, but not yet a flood of successful claims.
From consumer to criminal: Turkey's radical shift
While European courts debate director liability, Turkey is pursuing a different and arguably more radical approach: criminalising the players themselves. Under current Turkish law, illegal gambling operators face prison terms of three to five years, while players are only fined – between TL 100,000 and TL 400,000 ($2,200 to $8,800).
Turkey's Justice Minister Akın Gürlek, who took office in February 2026, has stated plainly that new regulations are being drafted to make illegal gambling participation a criminal offence for players.
"Those who organise, broker, transfer money and provide bank accounts are criminal," he said. "But someone who engages in illegal betting is not committing a crime. We are working on a regulation to make it a crime."
This represents a potentially significant philosophical shift. Traditionally, most jurisdictions have treated players primarily as consumers to be protected – the subjects of harm-reduction policy, addiction services and responsible gambling frameworks. Turkey appears increasingly willing to reframe participation itself as criminal conduct, placing players on the same side of the law as the operators and networks profiting from illegal markets.
Whether that framing is legally coherent or ethically proportionate is another matter, but it marks a clear departure from the consumer-protection orthodoxy that has dominated gambling policy in most regulated markets.
In any case, this is not a sudden impulse. Turkey's illegal gambling market is vast and deeply entrenched, with an estimated economic impact exceeding $40bn when addiction and social harm are factored in.
Between 2006 and 2026, authorities identified 585,645 illegal gambling websites and blocked 555,574 of them – yet criminal networks continue reappearing under new domains and mirror sites. In 2024, the number of people seeking addiction help at Turkey's national counselling centres for gambling exceeded those seeking help for alcohol and substance abuse.
The illegal market has grown increasingly sophisticated, operating with call centres, recruitment departments and software teams that would be unrecognisable from the criminal networks of a decade ago.
Those running, or even playing in, unlicensed markets would be unwise to assume that corporate structures alone still provide the shelter they once did
Against that backdrop, Turkey's turn to player criminalisation reflects a government that has exhausted most of its conventional enforcement toolkit and is reaching for harsher deterrents.
Of course, the ethics of penalising consumers for participating in a market that exists partly because legal alternatives are restricted is, to put it mildly, contested.
Yet whether prison sentences for players would meaningfully reduce demand – or simply drive behaviour further underground while ensnaring ordinary users rather than the criminal networks at the top – is a question that has not been resolved anywhere in the world.
The soldier, the prediction market and the $410,000 bet
Adding texture to this picture is the case of US Army soldier Gannon Van Dyke, charged in April 2026 with using classified military information to profit from bets on the prediction market platform Polymarket.
Van Dyke allegedly wagered around $33,000 on Venezuela-related outcomes while in possession of non-public information about a US military operation, generating roughly $410,000 in profit before markets resolved. The charges include commodities fraud, wire fraud and theft of government information.
This case is categorically different from the European licensing disputes – it concerns insider information rather than unlicensed gambling. But it adds another data point to the emerging pattern: the individual, not just the institution, is increasingly the target of enforcement.
Polymarket as a platform has faced separate criticism, but it is Van Dyke personally who faces up to 20 years in prison.
So… Is this actually a "new vogue"?
The honest answer is: probably not yet – but the trajectory is very real. Individual liability in gambling is not a new concept. Operators have always faced personal criminal exposure for fraud or money laundering. Directors of rogue operations have occasionally been prosecuted.
What is new is the systematic legal architecture now being assembled – through ECJ jurisprudence, national tort claims and proposed criminal legislation – that makes individual accountability a routine enforcement tool rather than an exceptional one.
The Wunner ruling is genuinely significant not because it immediately opens the floodgates of successful director lawsuits, but because it removes a structural argument that directors could previously rely upon.
Turkey's player criminalisation proposals represent an escalation of enforcement philosophy that, if enacted and enforced, would be genuinely novel among major markets.
The Polymarket prosecution demonstrates that even novel gambling-adjacent platforms are not immune from individual accountability frameworks.
Whether courts, legislators and regulators across other jurisdictions follow these leads will determine whether 2026 looks, in retrospect, like the beginning of a lasting shift or a cluster of exceptional circumstances.
Either way, those running – or even playing in – unlicensed markets would be unwise to assume that corporate structures alone still provide the shelter they once did.
Thus, it is worth considering not only whether individual liability is fashionable, but whether it can be pursued effectively and proportionately going forward.
Applied carefully, it could strengthen compliance culture and sharpen market integrity. Applied too aggressively, it risks chilling legitimate businesses, driving players deeper underground and consuming enforcement resources better spent on the criminal networks at the top of the chain.
In any case, one thing seems clear: gambling enforcement is no longer just about companies. The individuals behind – and inside – the industry are increasingly on notice. The only real question is how far this goes…
Malta's Bill 55, introduced in 2023, instructs Maltese courts to disregard foreign judgments against MGA-licensed operators. The European Commission has launched infringement proceedings against the law
