Betting Your Future: Crypto Casinos Radicalizing Young Men into Hate

Key Takeaways:

• The growing, and largely unregulated, online crypto casino industry has become a font of far-right radicalization and hate.
• Popular platforms like Duel, Stake, and Rainbet have secured their growth with marketing deals with far-right and far-right-adjacent influencers, including avowed neo-Nazis and manosphere streamers who reach tens of millions of young men.
• Financial strain from gambling debt is a documented radicalization risk factor, and researchers link it to extremism through the same pathways as unemployment or other major destabilizing life events.
• With no meaningful self-exclusion options and an entire industry that monetizes addiction, crypto casinos are positioned to convert a generation of young men’s financial desperation into a recruitment pipeline for the far-right.

The metastasizing online crypto casino industry, which operates in a largely unregulated space, should be of considerable concern for those focused on combating far-right radicalization and hate. These casinos, which function outside of traditional gambling-industry norms and regulations, market their businesses by engaging directly with right-leaning and far-right influencers and streamers, whose audience consists of primarily young men.

Combine this growing industry with the overarching boom of online gambling and you have a recipe for disaster. Today, you can bet on almost anything from anywhere in the world on your phone, and 90% of bets are placed on phones. This ability to bet from anywhere, at any time, has invigorated a new kind of gambling epidemic, particularly in America, where gambling is traditionally a heavily regulated industry.

It is no coincidence that this epidemic is affecting young men and boys the hardest. In the past year, 36% of boys ages 11 to 17 reported engaging in gambling behavior. Most of them were first exposed to online gambling through streaming and influencer affiliates of online casinos. While hundreds of crypto casinos operate online, some of the most popular leverage far-right and far-right-adjacent creators to promote gambling content.

Gambling debt and addiction makes individuals increasingly vulnerable as they grapple with the feelings of helplessness and stigma that comes with financial difficulties, putting them at high-risk for radicalization toward hate movements. Multiple studies have shown that financial difficulties can increase an individual’s risk of radicalization or joining a hate group, so much so that multiple governments, including the United States and the United Kingdom, officially recognize “changing personal circumstances,” like financial stress, as a risk factor for mobilization to extremist violence.

How Crypto Casinos Work

Crypto casinos are a type of online gambling which allows individuals to play typical casino games and slot machines online, using cryptocurrencies to bypass financial and state regulations. These casinos remain largely unregulated and incredibly easy to access, even in places like the United States, which has historically had strict gambling laws.

Take for example Stake, which is one of the most popular crypto casinos operating today. Its original crypto casino, Stake.com, is licensed in Curaçao and operates under the island’s laws and regulations, which are incredibly lax and virtually non-existent. In most of the United States, online casinos are illegal, meaning that users cannot reach Stake.com from a U.S.-based IP address.

To circumvent these laws, Stake started Stake.us, which it says legally operates in most states. Stake.us bypasses the need to obtain a gambling license by calling itself a “social casino,” where players use “virtual currency” instead of real money. Of course, that “virtual currency” does have a monetary value, and players can ultimately cash out their digital credits to receive real-money winnings. Some states argue that this is still online gambling and are suing Stake.us for this perceived violation.

It is a complicated system, as users can play games on Stake.us with two different “tokens”: one called “Gold Coins,” and another called “Stake Cash.” “Gold Coins” can be purchased and used to play in a mode where there are no real winnings. “Stake Cash” cannot be bought and instead is awarded through play or as a “bonus” based on play or when users buy “Gold Coins.” When users play with “Stake Cash,” those winning can be redeemed at the rate of 1 “Stake Cash” for $1. Once you have reached a minimum, “Stake Cash” can be cashed out and added to your crypto wallet. That cryptocurrency can then be exchanged for traditional currency.

Most people can easily subvert U.S. regulations and play on websites like Stake.com via a virtual private network (VPN) to mask their location’s IP address, allowing them access to websites blocked in their home country.

Crypto casinos also have a significant problem with valid age identification, if they even attempt it at all. A New York Times investigation spoke directly with an individual who started playing in these casinos at the age of 14, gambled away his childhood savings (approximately $12,000), and took out $4,000 in loans just to keep playing. The individual did all of this before the age of 18.

This has created a black market for IDs people can use to create accounts. The black-market functions by individuals obtaining real IDs collected in places like India and Kenya that are then sold to individuals online to gamble under false identities. Because payouts occur in crypto currency, there is no need to connect those IDs to wallets or bank accounts to collect casino winnings.

Crypto casinos also break with well-established rules of the gambling industry created to help those struggling with gambling addictions. In most U.S.-based casinos or sportsbooks, people who struggle with problem gambling can self-exclude, which is the process of asking casinos or other gambling venues to ban them to avoid relapsing. In most crypto casinos, there is no process to self-exclude, and even if there is, there is another crypto casino waiting right around the corner.

A quick scroll through the Reddit forums “r/problemgambling” and “r/GamblingAddiction” show just how damaging this lack of oversight can be. One user wrote “I don’t know how to beat this addiction when it’s literally impossible to self exclude from crypto casinos because they let you make as many new accounts as you want and do [zero] identity verification. I’m literally terrified that I can’t self exclude from them.”

Influencer Marketing

Crypto casinos flourish online due to their use of influencer affiliate marketing. Influencer affiliate marketing typically involves a company providing an influencer with a code or sign-up link, and the influencer then shares that link with their audience. When people sign up with the code or link, the influencer receives a portion of that sale or revenue generated by the user.

With online crypto casinos, affiliates can earn money on each wager placed by people who sign up using their respective referral code. These incentivize the influencer to make gambling look as appealing as possible, sometimes even placing riskier bets to increase the potential of a big win or a big loss to drive up viewership. Slots, which are some of the most popular games to stream, also yield the largest payout for affiliates. Slots are also riskier for viewers, as the betting structure can be confusing and far too difficult to know how much money is lost before it is too late.

Larger influencers bypass the affiliate structure altogether and are instead paid large sums of money to play exclusively with certain casinos. The most popular streamers are being paid more than $100 million to exclusively gamble on certain sites and to promote gambling to their audiences. Other smaller streamers sign deals in the $15 million range.

The use of influencer marketing significantly harms younger demographics, nearly half of adolescent boys who gamble were first exposed to gambling content online. Nearly 60% of those were exposed to gambling content organically, meaning they were not seeking it out and were first exposed to gambling via an algorithm’s recommendation.

Ties to the Far-Right and the Far-Right Adjacent 

Hundreds of crypto casinos exist in the online space and some of the most popular leverage far-right and far-right-adjacent creators to promote gambling content.

Duel

Duel is an online crypto casino owned by Finnish poker player Ossi Ketola, who goes by the name “Monarch.” Ketola has a lengthy history of racism, including dressing up as a Nazi and using the official account of one of his betting websites to tell a black man, “shut up n*gger.” His biography on Instagram reads, “Looking for an art school to adopt me,” a possible reference to Adolf Hitler, who was infamously rejected from art school as a young man.

Ketola allegedly offered to pay the $1 million bond that has been set for racist streamer Chud the Builder, aka Dalton Eatherly, who is currently awaiting trial for attempted murder after he allegedly shot a Black disabled veteran in May of 2026. The shooting occurred in Tennessee, and Eatherly was livestreaming during the attack.

In early September, Ketola livestreamed a white supremacist march in Finland and described it as “saving white Finland.” The march, which was held in Hakaniemi Market Square in Helsinki, was organized by Finland’s Blue-and-Black Movement (or Sinimusta Liike), an openly racist and fascist political party in Finland. The march also allegedly included approximately 40 members of a Finnish neo-Nazi Active Club.

While Duel features all the games as other online crypto casinos, it is best known for its live tables, where live people deal cards to online players, simulating a real casino playing experience. Duel often sets up absurd and outlandish scenarios for their live dealers to conduct on stream, boosting the probability of the clips going viral.

Duel has a long history of featuring Nazi imagery in its live tables, including a woman dressed as an SS officer assaulting a male co-host who was pretending to be Jewish. During a stream following the May 2026 shooting at the San Diego Islamic Center, Duel had a live dealer dressed as one of the attackers, imitating a TikTok the attacker had posted in the weeks before the shooting.

Duel has also allowed Paul Miller, who goes by the username GypsyCrusader, to be featured as a live dealer. Miller is an outspoken neo-Nazi and a former member of the Boogaloo movement. He would frequently stream in front of a Nazi flag in a Joker costume. The ADL reported him to the FBI, which likely led to his 2021 arrest for felony weapons charges.

According to the Canadian Anti-Hate Network, Miller gained over 40,000 followers on Telegram prior to his arrest, and his followers attempted to crowdfund his legal fees, but were shut out by crowdfunding websites.

Miller was placed on supervised release following his jail term. In late 2025, Miller attempted to have his supervision terminated early, with his lawyer telling the judge, “The racially motivated anything is just an act, and all for entertainment purposes alone via social media, and it’s how he makes his money as well. He’s completely changed his life.” The judge denied Miller’s motion, and his release ended as scheduled in June 2026.

Miller, now able to travel, used his newfound freedom to work as a live dealer for Duel and fight in a Duel-sponsored boxing event. At the boxing event, Miller was paired with a Jewish fighter and had neo-Nazi and Blood Tribe leader Christopher Pohlhaus and antisemitic podcaster Jake Shields standing in his corner of the ring.

Stake

Stake.com is one of the most popular online crypto casinos. Australian duo Edward “Ed” Craven and Bijan Tehrani founded Stake.com in 2017. The year prior, the pair had founded Easygo Gaming, a company that developed online casino games. As young men themselves, Craven and Tehrani understood the appeal of using social media to market.

Stake was one of the pioneers of marketing through influencers on streaming platforms like Twitch. Signing deals with some of the biggest streamers on the platform, Stake was well on its way to massive domination of the industry. In 2022, however, Twitch banned gambling on its website, citing the risk that these online crypto casinos do not provide sufficient consumer protections.

No problem for Craven and Tehrani though; they just started up their own streaming platform. Kick.com became that platform, a place where gambling streams could dominate with no regulation. Based and incorporated in Melbourne, Australia, Kick has a notoriously lax content moderation policy and has become a haven for far-right streamers when they are pushed off other platforms.

Some frequent Kick streamers include people like Amrou Fudl (“Myron Gaines”), one half of the manosphere influencer duo “Fresh and Fit,” who frequently promotes antisemitic tropes online. Also streaming on Kick is Clavicular, whose real name is Braden Peters. Peters is a very popular online figure who gained popularity for “looksmaxxing,” a term that originated in the far-right and misogynistic involuntary celibate (incel) online culture.

Some of Stake’s largest affiliates include rapper Aubrey Graham, known by his stage name Drake, and streamer Aiden Ross. They signed multi-million-dollar deals to exclusively stream on Kick and gamble on Stake. The two often gamble together on streams.

Ross started streaming in his late teens on Twitch and gained rapid popularity for playing games and pretending to be gay. He was first suspended from Twitch in April 2021, when a guest on his stream used a homophobic slur in response to Ross pretending to be gay.

Ross has deep connections to multiple far-right figures and has often streamed with them in the past. In 2022, Ross became obsessed with manosphere influencer and accused sex trafficker, Andrew Tate.  Ross had Tate on his stream multiple times, with Tate becoming a sort of mentor to Ross. Ross even flew to Romania to see Tate after he was placed on house arrest due to sexual assault and sex trafficking charges.

Tate was Ross’ entry into far-right spaces. After Tate, Ross frequently called neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes on his Kick streams and also streamed a call with an anonymous man wearing a mask with a swastika and hateful slurs written on it, with a “Black Sun” flag hung on the wall. “I’m not trying to give you a platform, I just want to know why are you like this,” Ross said. “Why not?” the interviewee replied. “The Jews want to get rid of white people. Why not fight back?” Ross told the unidentified man that he was “wrong” for expressing such hate but only ended the call after the man started reciting racist and homophobic slurs.

Ross became so popular that he caught the eye of Barron Trump, Donald Trump’s youngest son. Barron reportedly encouraged his father to go on Ross’ livestream in the lead up to the 2024 election to engage young male voters. During the stream, Ross gave Trump a Cybertruck with “Make America Great Again” engraved on the hood and photos of Trump following his assassination attempt on each door. Ross also reportedly gave Trump a Rolex watch.

Ross was banned from Kick for a short period at the end of 2025 for accepting a new $100 million deal with a competing crypto casino, Rainbet. He has since been reinstated and is now sponsored by Rainbet.

Rainbet

Rainbet is another online crypto casino that has cozied up to far-right figures and influencers in recent years. Founded in 2023, Rainbet is one of the newer online crypto casinos in the game. Very little is known about Rainbet’s ownership and origins, despite its increasing visibility and popularity in recent years.

Rainbet publicly names their CEO as “John Evans,” but little about Evans has been verified. There have been entire online campaigns to find out more information about him, including if he is even real. Rainbet is Evans’ only listed work experience on his purported LinkedIn page. What is known is that Rainbet, like many other online casinos, is licensed in Curaçao and Anjouan, an autonomous volcanic island in the southwestern Indian Ocean that is part of the Union of the Comoros. Rainbet’s parent company, RBGAMING N.V., is also a registered business in Curaçao.

Aside from becoming the most recent sponsor of Adin Ross, Rainbet has sponsored controversial far-right influencers to raise their brand’s awareness, even poaching large streamers from other online casinos by offering them more money. Rainbet reportedly offered Ross $100 million to drop his deal with Stake and sign exclusively with them.

In a late August stream, Ross played clips from the Duel-sponsored fight, including one featuring Miller and Pohlhaus performing Roman Salutes to the song “Erika,” a soldier song used by the Nazi Wehrmacht during World War 2. Ross comments that the video is “wack” and asks why his chat is saying the video has “aura,” a slang term used to describe something or someone who is stylish and confident.

After Ross watched the clips from the fight, he switched to play slots on Rainbet. Ross began playing with approximately $150,000. After an hour of play, Ross had lost around $100 thousand, ending the gaming with $45,203. Ross then played Keno, another casino game, for a bit before ending his stream.

Rainbet has also sponsored Harrison Sullivan, who goes by the online name “HSTikkyTokky,” reportedly offering him a $15 million annual deal to play exclusively with Rainbet. Sullivan is a British social media influencer known for his association with the manosphere. Most notably, he was featured in a recent documentary by Louie Theroux, titled “Louie Theroux: Inside the Manosphere.”

In the documentary, Theroux met with Sullivan multiple times and showed clips from his livestreams, where the Rainbet advertising is prominently displayed. Theroux confronted Harrison with some of his previous statements, including one where he said, “Call me racist, call me a misogynist, call me homophobic, call me a scammer – I’m all those things,” and another where Harrison said he would disown his own son if he was gay. Harrison rebutted by saying that he does not care what people think of him and that disowning a gay child is not homophobic, because being gay is a failure of parenting. Harrison was previously suspended from Kick for using a homophobic slur during his livestream.

Despite the increased scrutiny of Sullivan after Theroux’s documentary, Rainbet has continued to sponsor him. In early September, it was announced that Rainbet would partner with Sullivan’s boxing promotional company, Unhinged Promotions, to sponsor a fight in Dublin.

Risks of Radicalization

While there are many concerns that come with this gambling epidemic, one of the most dangerous is the increased risk of radicalization. Experts have come to a consensus that significant financial strain can increase an individual’s risk of seeking out extremist groups as a solace for their struggles.

A 2021 RAND study built on interviews with former extremists and their families found financial instability, alongside mental health challenges and social factors like victimization and marginalization, was a frequent factor in an individuals’ path into extremism. In more than half of RAND’s cases, radicalization followed a specific “re-orienting event,” like an extended period of unemployment, a gun charge, or a friend’s suicide. Gambling debt is a manufactured version of exactly that kind of destabilizing event; it can be sudden, humiliating, and deeply isolating.

A 2026 study in Current Psychology built a structural equation model testing why financial hardship predicts support for violent radicalization, and found the relationship runs through depressive symptoms. Perceived or actual financial difficulties were positively and significantly associated with support for violent radicalization, mediated by depression, with the effect intensifying under perceived discrimination. Debt doesn’t radicalize people directly, it wears them down, and that erosion is what extremist movements are built to exploit.

JT Chapman, who goes by the YouTube channel name “Second Thought” summed up this phenomenon best in his video about the gambling epidemic: “And look, I get why all this is popular, especially for the young white guys in their late teens, 20s, and early 30s, who are the biggest demographic for this stuff. All the guarantees of middle-class life you could have come to expect as a white dude. The upward mobility of a college education, the predictability of career advancement at a stable job, the manageable cost of housing and healthcare, that’s all gone. It’s gone for everyone, but we expected it most. So, if everything in your life is trending downwards and the prospects are getting slimmer as capitalism keeps more and more wealth at the top, gambling offers a narrative of hope that you can still get your hockey stick graph. You can still have your American dream. And that’s powerfully attractive.”

What Can Be Done?

As is the case with most awful things on the internet, the U.S. regulatory system has struggled to keep pace with the ever-changing online environment. Online gaming is no different. The Wire Act of 1961 prohibits interstate gambling on the federal level, but does allow states to regulate gambling within their respective borders. Eight states — Connecticut, Delaware, Michigan, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Maine, and West Virginia — have fully legalized online gambling. In 42 states and the District of Columbia, online gambling remains illegal. The problem? The internet does not stop at state or international borders.

Common Sense Media, which conducted a wide-ranging study on young boys’ use of online gambling sites, recommended several changes that can be made at different levels, including for families, schools, policymakers, and industry. These include steps like creating stronger age verification capabilities, restricting the advertising of gambling sites (particularly for streamers with young audiences), and talking more openly with young people about addiction and more closely monitoring their online activity.

These crypto casinos are not just a gambling problem; it’s an extremism and radicalization problem. By combining lax regulation, algorithmic exposure, and direct partnerships with far-right and far-right-adjacent influencers, this industry has built infrastructure that feeds young men financial ruin and hateful ideology at the same time. Debt destabilizes; extremism offers a foothold. Until regulators, platforms, and streaming sites treat that connection as seriously as they treat the billions of dollars changing hands, crypto casinos will keep functioning as a farm system for radicalization.