Turkey detains 22 over PEKINBET payments, Duel apologizes after a $24.4 million hack, and TENNISI exits Russia on September 1

This batch of news is mostly about payment rails and enforcement pressure around iGaming: arrests in Turkey, Singapore, and South Korea, a tax miss in the Netherlands, and two Russian sportsbook updates that matter to anyone watching market exits and user-flow changes.

1. In Turkey, authorities detained 22 people in a case tied to the financial support of the illegal iGaming platform PEKINBET. For PSPs and payment teams, that is the familiar pattern: once the payment layer becomes visible, the case stops being just about the operator.
2. Duel’s founder apologized to users for provocative live games just days before information was published about a platform breach involving $24.4 million. The timing is awkward enough on its own; for operators and providers, the practical takeaway is that product decisions and security incidents tend to collide in public, not in neat sequence.
3. In Singapore, nine people were detained in connection with an international illegal betting network. The cross-border angle matters here: once a network starts moving funds and users across jurisdictions, enforcement usually follows the payments rather than the brand.
4. The Netherlands missed out on €100 million after increasing its gambling tax. For regulated operators, this is the sort of number finance teams and policy teams both care about: tax changes do not just alter margins, they also change how much revenue actually reaches the treasury.
5. From September 1, TENNISI will stop accepting bets in Russia after 27 years of operation. Separately, a source said that Liga Stavok is shutting down its free predictions platform, Liga Market. Both are reminders that sportsbook businesses can reshape product lines quickly when commercial or regulatory pressure changes.
6. In South Korea, authorities detained 172 members of a group that used accounts belonging to hard-of-hearing people to place bets on illegal iGaming platforms. The structure here is the part that matters: account misuse at scale is a payments and fraud problem before it is anything else.