Philippines blocks 8,000 merchant accounts linked to illegal online casinos

The Philippines has blocked 8,000 merchant accounts tied to illegal online casinos. For high-risk PSPs, that is the practical part of the story: merchant-account cleanup is not just a compliance exercise, it can cut off payment access at scale.

1. The action involved 8,000 merchant accounts, according to the source.
2. Those accounts were linked to illegal online casinos, putting them squarely in the high-risk payments lane where acquirers, PSPs, and banks tend to look very closely at merchant provenance and transaction patterns.
3. The source does not provide further details on which institutions were involved, the timeline of the blocks, or whether any wider enforcement measures accompanied the account closures.