Danish founder launches London company Trace2Trace to map offshore gambling operator networks

Jesper Kampmann Madsen, a former problem gambler, has founded Trace2Trace in London to build technology that maps the networks behind illegal gambling sites. For PSPs and acquiring teams, the point is obvious: the real counterparty is often not a single domain but a cluster of domains, redirects, hosting footprints, and cloned brands.

1. Trace2Trace says it uses a dataset of about 620,000 gambling-site records to map the most problematic sites, identify their relationships, and build a broader picture of the networks behind them. In practice, that is the sort of infrastructure intelligence banks and payment providers need when they are trying to decide whether a merchant is isolated or just one node in a wider web.
2. According to the company, it receives about 7,000 domains a day through its tracked lists, including new and cloned sites. That volume matters because offshore operators do not usually sit still; they spin up replacements, mirrors, and lookalikes faster than most risk teams can manually review them.
3. Trace2Trace looks for links between sites through shared hosting, DNS clusters, source-code strings, tracking systems, logos, and site icons. The system can also track redirects and other mechanisms that may be invisible in a normal web request, which is exactly the kind of thing that causes a merchant review to look clean on paper and messy in practice.
4. On Trace2Trace’s website, the company shows a domain map for offshore operator 1xBet. An initial scan reportedly found about 1,600 domains, followed by another about 4,500, bringing the total discovered to 6,000 domains — which Madsen says is only a small part of the offshore network.
5. Madsen says his work is not driven by opposition to the gambling industry or to licensed operators, and is aimed strictly at illegal operators. He first moved into anti-illegal work with Spilfri(.)nu, a free blocking and support service for people with gambling problems.