Ukraine's PlayCity Pulls Kick Into Its Crackdown on Black-Market Gambling Ads

Ukraine's gambling regulator has added Kick to the list of platforms that take its takedown requests, and the choice of platform is the point. PlayCity, the state agency that replaced KRAIL in 2025, said on June 23 that Kick has agreed to report and block channels promoting unlicensed gambling to Ukrainian audiences. Kick is owned by Easygo Entertainment, the Melbourne group whose founders Ed Craven and Bijan Tehrani also own the crypto-casino brand Stake. That makes this the first case of a regulator getting takedown cooperation from a platform whose owners run one of the largest unlicensed-friendly betting operators in the world. The pattern here is the same one UK regulators are fighting over black-market ads on Big Tech: the promotion has moved to the platforms least willing to police it.

The opening numbers are small. PlayCity said Kick has already blocked two channels that were pushing unlicensed gambling to a combined 1,200 followers, after the regulator handed Kick's headquarters a list of offending channels. "We are directly providing Kick's headquarters with a list of channels that violate legislation and illegally advertise gambling," the agency said. Kick joins TikTok, Meta (Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp), Google (YouTube and Google Search), Twitch and Viber on PlayCity's enforcement roster. Across all of those platforms in the past month, the regulator said it secured blocks on 37 accounts with a combined audience above 895,000.

Why Kick, and why now

Kick exists because of a gambling-ad crackdown. In September 2022 Twitch banned streams of unlicensed slots, roulette and dice sites, naming Stake.com, Roobet, Rollbit and Duelbits, with the ban taking effect on October 18, 2022. Sports betting, fantasy and poker stayed allowed. The casino streamers left almost overnight, and Kick, launched in December 2022 by Stake's founders, took them in with a 95/5 revenue split against Twitch's 50/50 and no ban on gambling content. Adin Ross and xQc signed in 2023; xQc has said Stake pays him roughly $200,000 per gambling stream regardless of duration or wagers. The result is a platform with a dedicated gambling category, thin age checks and a heavy population of influencers pushing referral codes and affiliate links. In February, the British streamer The United Strand drew criticism for broadcasting a West Ham vs Manchester United match on Kick while wearing Stake branding.

That history is why other regulators will watch whether this agreement holds. If Kick will act on a Ukrainian list, the question is whether it acts on a British, Brazilian or Dutch one, and whether it does so for channels run by streamers it pays. Twitch's 2022 ban is the cautionary precedent: the prohibited streaming did not stop, it relocated to a platform the same owners controlled. A takedown agreement that removes two small channels while the host platform's business model still rewards the behavior is a narrow win.

The enforcement machine behind it

The Kick deal is one piece of a wider PlayCity enforcement build-out in its first year. The regulator runs a public complaint form, taking 425 complaints to date including 19 in June, and operates a two-stage process: refer for takedown, then investigate for sanctions, with cases that fall outside the legal definition dismissed. Since it began this work, PlayCity says it has restricted 785 social-media accounts and imposed UAH 988 million (about $24 million) in fines on gambling organizers, plus UAH 80 million (about $1.9 million) in penalties for advertising-rule breaches. The per-violation advertising fine runs to UAH 5.2 million (about $156,000). The mechanics echo the broader European fight against black-market SEO and affiliate funnels and the advertising backlash operators face over aggressive promotion.

The enforcement sits inside a wartime regulatory tightening. In April 2024 President Zelensky signed a decree banning serving military personnel from online gambling under martial law, ordering restrictions on gambling advertising (with particular focus on ads using Armed Forces symbols), a public addiction-awareness campaign, an online monitoring system and the blocking of illegal sites. Ukraine later restricted gambling advertising broadly in May 2024. PlayCity has since launched DSOM, the State Online Monitoring System, on a test basis, with the first 11 operators connected; it is built to record bets, returns and payouts at 10,000 to 100,000 operations per second and feed anonymized data to the State Tax Service.

For affiliates and operators, the read is concrete. The licensed market is large enough to defend: Ukraine collected close to UAH 17 billion in gambling tax in 2025 and more than UAH 3.48 billion in the first quarter of 2026, with full-year 2025 receipts projected near UAH 19 billion (about $465 million). Licensed online operators pay 18% GGR tax, and player winnings carry a 19.5% levy (18% income tax plus a 1.5% military charge). PlayCity issued 250 licences in its first year. Channels promoting unlicensed brands to Ukrainian users now face a regulator that has a complaint pipeline, a fines record and, as of this week, a reporting line into Kick. Affiliates monetizing referral codes on streaming platforms should assume the takedown roster keeps growing. The same crackdown logic is spreading across jurisdictions, from Indonesia's World Cup illegal-betting surge to outright criminalization in markets such as Egypt.

What is unproven is durability. PlayCity has the agreement; it does not yet have a track record of Kick acting at scale, and Kick's owners profit from the streams the deal is meant to curb.