Ukraine cyber police are investigating 1xBet fund flows through a network of crypto exchanges

Ukraine’s cyber police say two Ukrainian nationals used verified accounts on crypto exchanges to move significant volumes of money from gray-market platforms, including 1xBet, which has been under SNBO sanctions since March 2023. For high-risk PSPs, the relevant bit is not the gambling brand itself but the mechanics: exchange-hopping, minimal balances left on accounts, and blockchain traces that point back to multiple illegal casino clusters.

1. The investigation names two Ukrainian citizens whose verified crypto-exchange accounts were used to process funds from gray-market sources. According to investigators, the money was then immediately routed onward to other exchanges or external wallets, leaving only small balances behind. Police described that pattern as layering, meaning a structure designed to make the origin of the funds harder to trace.
2. In the first case, a suspect based in Kyiv region used accounts on Binance, Bybit, and BingX, with total turnover of about $9.17 million from 2022 to 2026. Chainalysis was brought in for blockchain analysis, and investigators say some of the funds can be traced to illegal casino clusters including 1xBet, BC.Game, CloudBet, and Shuffle.
3. The same case also involved moving funds between different exchanges, which investigators say made transaction tracing more difficult. That matters operationally because exchange-to-exchange hopping is often where simple source-of-funds checks stop being enough.
4. In the second case, a suspect in Odesa region used a Bitget account with turnover of about $2.6 million over three months in 2026. Police say there were no recorded buy, sell, or crypto-swap operations on that account, which led them to treat it as a transit account rather than a trading account.
5. Chainalysis says a significant share of the inflows to that Bitget account was also linked to the 1xBet cluster. For PSPs and exchanges, the practical takeaway is straightforward: verified KYC on an account does not tell you much if the account is just a waypoint in a laundering chain.

1xBet has been under sanctions by Ukraine’s SNBO since March 2023. In this kind of case, the compliance issue is less about a single merchant and more about the network: sanctioned gambling brands, crypto exchanges, and wallet movement stitched together into one flow.