Illegal online casinos are using gaming websites to bypass blocks and surface in Yandex search results

Russian illegal casino operators have found a workaround for Roskomnadzor’s blocking regime: they are planting casino posts inside unrelated thematic websites, and those pages are still being indexed by Yandex. For PSPs and affiliate teams, the detail that matters is simple: the traffic source is not just search, it is search plus recurring publication control on legitimate-looking domains.

1. Law firm DRC traced the scheme after a client asked how her husband had found an online casino in the first place. The answer was not a standalone gambling site, but articles on allmmorpg.ru and tesera.ru — a site about MMORPGs and a site about board games — both regularly publishing “Top-10 online casinos in Russia” alongside unrelated content.
2. Those posts contain bonus roundups, withdrawal tips for Russian cards, and links to Melbet, Spinbetter, Mellstroy, Apex and CryptoBoss Casino. According to the source, none of those casinos has a license in Russia, yet the articles still appear in Yandex search results.
3. The blocking mechanics create the opening. Roskomnadzor blocks specific URLs, but to get a page into the register, someone has to find it, document it, and wait for a decision from the Federal Tax Service or a court. That process takes days and even weeks, while each casino article lives for one to several days, disappears, and is immediately replaced by a new URL carrying the same text.
4. DRC checked the post metadata through the site’s public API and found a scheduled publishing pattern. On 8 October, allmmorpg.ru published eight identical articles in six hours, including two posts that went live two seconds apart and one that appeared exactly 55 minutes 00 seconds after the previous one. The firm says that points to queued, managed publication rather than a hack: someone has ongoing access to the site admin panel and is clearing old posts while pushing new ones.
5. The links run through redirect domains and include affiliate identifiers, which casino operators use to calculate who gets paid for bringing in a player. DRC says the same partner account numbers were found across both sites for Melbet, Spinbetter, Mellstroy and Apex, with only the labels changing — RPG for allmmorpg.ru and Tes for tesera.ru — so conversion can be tracked separately by channel. In practical terms, the money flows from both sites to the same recipient.

The key takeaway for compliance teams and acquiring partners is that page-by-page blocking does not stop a setup where content expires faster than the registry process moves. In this case, the stable pieces are the host domain and the affiliate account — and those are the points that would need to be disrupted to cut the traffic and the payout flow.

Yandex is part of the picture too. Search results for “casino Russia” surface fresh posts from both sites, which gives the scheme the traffic it needs to function. The source says Russian law does not require Yandex to remove from search results pages that are not in the register.