Russian online casinos are using topic-site posts to surface in Yandex search results

Lawyers from DRC, a digital rights group, say online casinos are getting around Russian blocks by placing unrelated articles on thematic websites such as allmmorpg.ru and tesera.ru. For high-risk PSPs, the useful bit is not the content trick itself, but the distribution model: managed publishing, affiliate redirects, and fast domain rotation.

1. According to DRC, articles unrelated to the host sites’ themes appeared on allmmorpg.ru, a site about MMORPGs, and tesera.ru, a board games portal. Examples included pieces like “Top-10 online casinos in Russia.” These posts showed up in news feeds and in Yandex search results, stayed online for one to several days, and were then removed, after which the same text reappeared at a new URL.
2. DRC says this was not a hack. The people placing the articles had постоянный access to the sites’ admin panels. On 8 October, allmmorpg.ru published eight identical articles in six hours; on 13 October, it published seven in 68 minutes. In other words, this was a managed posting operation, not one-off spam.
3. The links led to Melbet, Spinbetter, Mellstroy, Apex, and CryptoBoss Casino. DRC says none of these platforms has a Russian licence. The traffic then passed through intermediate domains with affiliate IDs, which is how commissions are paid for referred players. Two of the websites had matching affiliate accounts and redirectors.
4. DRC’s point on enforcement is straightforward: Roskomnadzor blocks specific addresses, but to do that, authorities first need to identify and document the violation and then obtain a decision from the Federal Tax Service (FNS) or a court. That can take days or weeks. The FNS registry contained one blocked link from this scheme, but a week later the same links were working again through other redirectors.
5. The group says the more effective target is what does not change: the site domain and the affiliate account. DRC has sent materials to the prosecutor’s office, the FNS, Roskomnadzor, and the Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS). Experts cited in the report also note that the law does not require Yandex to remove pages that are not in Roskomnadzor’s registry, even though the company’s own rules allow it to remove illegal and spam content.

For operators and PSPs, the practical takeaway is that affiliate-led acquisition does not need a casino’s own domain to stay visible for long. A published article, a rotating URL, and a redirect chain can keep the funnel alive while the enforcement process catches up. That is exactly the sort of setup that matters when assessing merchant risk, red-flag patterns, and where a payment flow is actually coming from.