On a cool February evening in 2022, Turkish Cypriot businessman Halil Falyali was being driven home on a village road when he was ambushed. Attackers armed with automatic weapons unleashed a hail of bullets on his Escalade.
His driver fell dead behind the wheel. Falyali, a man built like a boulder, was still breathing when paramedics reached him, despite being shot multiple times. He was rushed to a local hospital — but within an hour he, too, was dead.
The killing sent shockwaves across northern Cyprus, the Turkish-backed breakaway region where Falyali had made his name. Breaking news alerts pinged on mobile phones, interrupting dinners. Social media posts quickly gained tens of thousands of views. “Night of Terror,” blared one newspaper headline. “Hearts are Broken,” declared another.
Publicly, Falyali had always portrayed himself as an ordinary businessman and hotel proprietor, albeit one with powerful connections. He was often photographed with senior Turkish Cypriot officials and never hid that he had close ties to the ruling National Unity Party, known as the UBP.
He also didn’t hide his wealth. Falyali regularly posted social media videos of himself driving dune buggies through his seaside estate, which featured a tropical garden, at least two swimming pools, and a fish pond for sturgeon, so he could farm his own caviar. His son appeared on YouTube posing with luxury cars, including a Rolls-Royce Phantom and McLaren 720S.
But behind the scenes, Turkish authorities had been looking into another aspect of Falyali’s business for years: An alleged illicit online gambling empire.
Halil Falyali showing off his living room on YouTube.
Ten months after the murder, in December 2022, Turkey’s interior minister held a press conference to declare a crackdown on what he said was a criminal organization running over a dozen illegal betting sites. Authorities had already seized over $40 million in assets from the group — but he said that was “just the beginning.” In December last year, Turkish prosecutors went on to indict more than 240 people, including Falyali’s widow, on illegal gambling and money laundering charges. The posthumous indictment accused Falyali of “establishing an organization with the aim of committing crime.”
The indictment is based on an unpublished 130-page report from Turkey’s finance ministry, obtained by OCCRP, which details the movement of payments from the alleged betting operation to a cryptocurrency wallet the investigators claimed belonged to Falyali.
As the trial moves through its early stages, another drama has been playing out — this one over a separate case involving Falyali’s longtime head of finance, Cemil Önal. In December 2023, Önal was arrested in the Netherlands on an Interpol warrant, issued at Turkey’s request, which described him as the man “in charge of Falyali’s money and finances” and claimed he was “one of the masterminds” of Falyali’s murder. He is now fighting extradition to Turkey, where he fears his life would be in danger.
Speaking from a Dutch prison, Önal told OCCRP he was not involved in Falyali’s death and insisted he was being targeted because he knew too much about illicit payments made to powerful people.
Officially, Önal worked for a Falyali-owned company that held a gambling license in northern Cyprus. But his real job, he said, was to help develop the illicit side of Falyali’s operations. By the time he stopped working for Falyali in late 2021, the alleged illegal gambling empire was making at least $80 million each month, employed hundreds of off-the-books workers, and oversaw thousands of betting sites aimed at gamblers in dozens of countries, Önal said. (OCCRP was not able to independently verify the specific revenue figure cited by Önal, but an expert who investigated similar networks in Asia said the volume was plausible.)
“I did not establish this system, this network for myself,” Önal said. “I established this system, this network for my boss."
Önal said he personally funneled roughly $15 million a month into “sponsorship” payments on behalf of Falyali’s organization, mostly to ruling party officials in Turkey and northern Cyprus. Much of this was delivered in cash, he said, while some transfers were arranged through gold trading and foreign exchange shops, making it difficult to trace.
Cemil Önal during an interview with OCCRP.
In over 20 hours of exclusive interviews, Önal laid out the workings of the alleged operation in unprecedented detail. While he was unable to provide documentation for his claims, journalists in a dozen countries independently corroborated many of them by hunting down company, property, and travel records, as well as law enforcement and court documents. They were also able to identify hundreds of websites set up by the alleged network. Experts confirmed that the model described by Önal closely resembled those found in other regions.
The 2022 Turkish finance ministry report listed around 100 cryptocurrency wallets it said were used by the group to transfer the “revenues of crime.” Using blockchain records, reporters found that these wallets have received more than $1.4 billion since 2018.
But these were just a fraction of the number of cryptocurrency wallets Önal says the network actually used. It also had other ways to move money around the world, including thousands of bank, credit card, and online payment accounts. (The finance ministry report said the group used over 1,500 bank accounts in Turkey alone.)
Using leaked property records and other documents from Dubai, which Önal identified as a major base for the network’s current operations, reporters also found tens of millions of dollars worth of properties owned by Falyali’s widow, Özge Taşker Falyali, who was among those indicted in 2024. She did not respond to questions about the source of the funds.
Turkish and Turkish Cypriot authorities did not respond to requests for comment.
Falyali’s Rise
The Mediterranean island of Cyprus is known for its golden beaches and ancient ruins. But the legendary birthplace of Aphrodite also has a darker side.
For half a century, the island has been divided by barbed wire and minefields between the internationally recognized Republic of Cyprus and the breakaway north, which was occupied by Turkey in 1974 in response to a coup aimed at annexing Cyprus to Greece.
The north — whose statehood is recognized only by Turkey — does not fully adhere to international law and global banking standards. The territory has become a haven for fugitives and dirty money from around the world. It has also become a gambling hotspot, especially after casinos were banned in Turkey in the late 1990s.
The war displaced both Greek and Turkish Cypriots, among them the Falyali family. When Falyali was a child, they fled Paphos, a seaside area in the Republic of Cyprus, and eventually settled in the district of Iskele, in what is now northern Cyprus. He was in his late twenties when the gambling industry started to take off in the north.
By 1998, he had started working as a casino manager, according to his brother Hüsnü, who gave an account of the family history to Turkey’s HalkTV in March 2022, the month after Falyali was gunned down. In 2007, he said, Falyali took over Les Ambassadeurs Hotel & Casino, an upscale resort in the port city of Kyrenia, which is now owned by his widow and their 12-year-old son.
Though Hüsnü stressed that Falyali’s gambling operations in northern Cyprus were legal, he acknowledged that his brother had moved into illegal betting in Turkey as early as 2004. “However, it cannot be said that every illegal betting site belongs to Halil Falyali,” he added.
The legal side of Falyali’s operations were run by a company called Larsen Technologies Ltd., which was registered in 2013.
Turkish Cypriot authorities granted Larsen a gaming license to operate in northern Cyprus in 2017. The company opened walk-in betting shops under the brand BetCyp, and registered a namesake website, BetCyp.com.
But according to Önal, Larsen was a front.
“That was our umbrella. In other words, we were under the name of a legal company in case of a police raid, a financial raid or anything else,” Önal explained. Larsen also formally employed Önal between 2016 and 2020, corporate records confirm.
Website domain registration records obtained by OCCRP suggest the company may have indeed been connected to illegal gambling: Dozens of betting sites blacklisted by Turkey and the European Union were registered by the same email address used to register BetCyp.com. The website also shared a Philippines-based server with dozens more blacklisted sites.
Much like legal betting sites, these unlicensed sites offer live casino games, digital slot machines, and sports betting, customized to the language of the target audience and presented with eye-catching graphics. Gamblers can pay by credit card and cryptocurrency, or via various online payment platforms. Players, drawn in by aggressive advertising and generous bonuses, may not even realize they are betting on a platform that is not licensed or regulated in their country.
The companies behind the websites identified by OCCRP mostly displayed gambling licenses from Curacao. The Caribbean island nation had for years permitted a handful of locally licensed companies to issue “sub-licences” to operators abroad, allowing Curacao-licensed operators to proliferate globally with no oversight or legal right to operate in regulated jurisdictions.
Sites such as BeteBet use flashy graphics to draw in gamblers.
When sites were shut down in countries where they violated local license restrictions, replacements could be quickly activated by using sequential domains purchased from web hosting services like GoDaddy, Önal said. GoDaddy did not respond to requests for comment.
He outlined the example of BeteBet, which was registered a year before Larsen was set up. The site was blacklisted by Turkey in 2017, the Republic of Cyprus in 2019, and Latvia in 2021. The site’s domain history hides its owner until 2019, when it starts showing that it was registered by Total Gaming Solutions B.V., a Curacao company used by a man named Ibrahim Tokkan to register over 500 sites. BeteBet was named in testimonies included in last year’s Turkish indictment, and Tokkan, who worked for Hüsnü Falyali, was charged as a manager of a criminal organization. Tokkan and Hüsnü Falyali did not respond to requests for comment.
“Let’s say someone made a complaint [and the BeteBet website] was shut down. In one moment, in 16 seconds, BeteBet2 will be live. These are very cheap,” Önal told OCCRP.
Online gambling operations often spread their infrastructure widely, for instance by registering companies in one country and placing servers in another, all while moving money through other jurisdictions in the form of cash or cryptocurrency, said Jeremy Douglas, chief of staff and strategy adviser for the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.
“Gambling is hugely addictive — it's a massive industry, already, going back years and years, of course, with casinos in Macau and Vegas and different parts of the world,” he told OCCRP. “But the internet has changed and supercharged it.”
The highest taxable income Larsen ever declared was $1.2 million, in 2021. But Önal alleged the company’s tax filings did not show the full picture, and were meant mostly to justify its official employees’ employment taxes.
By the time he left the operation, in late 2021, Önal said the business legally employed a couple of hundred people. But the true number of staff, he claimed, was more like 1,500, mainly male university students from Turkey.
Önal said payoffs to officials in Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party, known as the AKP, and the UBP in northern Cyprus helped ward off scrutiny. (Neither party responded to questions.)
UBP banners in northern Cyprus.
But the operation still had to keep up appearances — which meant being discreet about its large young workforce.
“This is a big number for Cyprus,” Önal said. “They have cars and everything because we pay them very well. Would this not stand out?”
So, he said, Larsen sent teams abroad to work in places like Malta, Belarus, and North Macedonia, to support the payments infrastructure behind the betting sites. (Önal did not provide documents to support this claim. Prosecutors in North Macedonia told OCCRP that two people suspected of organizing illegal online gambling for Turkish clients “show a connection” to Falyali, but noted the investigation is ongoing.)
How to Move Money Fast
Illicit online gambling has grown explosively in recent years, especially since the COVID-19 lockdowns. Today it is estimated to bring in hundreds of billions of dollars a year. But these windfalls come with a problem: How to move vast sums of cash without triggering the alarms of banks and police?
According to the Turkish finance ministry report and the subsequent indictment, Falyali’s organization set about recruiting thousands of people to open bank, credit card, crypto, and online payment processor accounts. These allegedly functioned as what money laundering experts call “mule accounts.” The basic idea is to collect player payments in different accounts, then move the funds through a large number of unrelated accounts to conceal the trail.
The money mules were often students, pensioners, housewives, or low-wage workers. Many were recruited through social media, where ads directed them to forms they could fill out. They then received a phone call instructing them how to open multiple bank accounts, according to a separate 2018 indictment issued by Turkish authorities against Önal and others on money laundering charges. (That trial is scheduled to begin later this year.)
In some cases, the indictment said, a man on a motorbike would then show up and collect their account information and debit cards in person. In exchange, the mules would earn about $570 a month.
Önal described a pyramid-style setup in which trusted individuals oversaw clusters of account holders, each making a commission from the money flows.
“Let’s say I am talking about our group in England … Ahmet is a kid working with me … Ahmet tells one of his friends, ‘Give me your account number, 500 pounds will arrive.’ [He] takes 10 percent of the 500 pounds — 50 pounds, gives me 450 pounds in cash.”
For every ten people there was a “guarantor,” responsible for making sure his group stays compliant, who splits his 10 percent with the account holders.
Douglas, the U.N. expert on organized crime, said the system described by Önal and the Turkish prosecutors was similar to ones he had seen in Asia, where taxi drivers were often recruited to move gambling proceeds.
“This is a highly technical crime, and you’ve got people in either corrupted or very low-capacity jurisdictions, or both, and they’re essentially unable or in some cases unwilling to do anything about it,” he said.
The amounts moved by mules could add up quickly. One Larsen employee, arrested in northern Cyprus in 2020, allegedly withdrew the equivalent of over $3 million from 376 bank accounts using ATM cards in just two months, according to police statements reported by local media. OCCRP was unable to determine the current status of the case or reach the employee for comment.
The system was not without its risks, however. In one 2017 call intercepted by Turkish investigators, the same Larsen employee can be heard telling a man Önal identified as one of the operation’s “guarantors” that an account holder had withdrawn the equivalent of at least $13,000 from four banks.
For higher volumes, Önal said, the organization looked for business accounts held by prominent figures, who were offered the same 10-percent commission as the guarantors.
“If the guy is a good businessman, a very famous businessman, let’s say he will deposit 100,000 euros,” he said. “Then we tell you, ‘Brother, give me the account of a businessman outside.’ So that the bank doesn’t ask when 100,000 euros arrive.”
The Turkish finance ministry report said that the money accumulated in front accounts was then transferred many times — a process that experts call “layering.” In one case, 10,105 transfers were made within 60 seconds, leading Turkish investigators to conclude that the process had been automated. The money was either turned into crypto assets or withdrawn as cash at ATMs, the report said.
Önal said that the cash collected from the organization’s operations in Europe and other regions was then consolidated in regional hubs in Eastern Europe and the Caucasus where the network could operate more freely.
‘There is Life, There Are Drinks’
The upscale Galleria Minsk shopping mall sits near the shores of the Svislach River in a lively district of the Belarusian capital. Owned by the son of a Kremlin-linked businessman, and counting a former Minsk city council member among its shareholders, the complex is known for its well-heeled clients as much as its shops.
The Galleria Minsk shopping mall in Belarus.
Inside the mall’s DoubleTree by Hilton Hotel is the H Casino, which opened in 2021. Its gilded halls, hung with chandeliers and traversed by women in elaborate costumes, regularly draw Russian and Turkish pop stars. The casino reports the highest financial turnover of any in the country, according to a commercial database of Belarusian companies.
This casino was also where Önal said he oversaw the collection of the cash from illegal betting operations in European markets, like Germany, Netherlands, the Czech Republic, Austria, and Poland. It also serves as a base for a Larsen finance team handling credit card payments.
With its low cost of living and high levels of official corruption, Belarus was an obvious place to base a contingent of Larsen’s staff, many of whom are recruited from among the Turkish students who study at northern Cyprus universities, Önal said.
“The kids love it,” he said. “There are a lot of girls there, there is life, there are drinks.’”
H Casino is wholly owned by a Turkish businessman, Mustafa Egemen Şener, who Önal says is Falyali’s business partner in Belarus. Şener did not respond to requests for comment.
Reporters also identified a man whose social media profiles list Falyali’s Les Ambassadeurs as a place of employment, who also worked as a manager of H Casino. Border records show that the man traveled with Şener between Belarus and Ukraine.
Some of the cash that comes to Belarus is parked in the casino’s accounts as proceeds, and can be transferred out to Dubai, according to Önal. Other amounts, he said, are flown directly to Larnaca International Airport in the Republic of Cyprus, from where the cash is then smuggled into northern Cyprus. (Planes can only land in northern Cyprus if they are coming from Turkey.)
The network had a process in place to make sure the cash could be moved north without any issues. First, a well-connected partner in the south would arrange for the money to be taken out of the airport in exchange for a three to five percent cut, Önal said. The undeclared money would bypass airport checks, with a payout to customs officials of some 5,000 euros per 1 million smuggled.
The partner would then ensure the security of the cash as it moved from the airport through the crossing checkpoint on the Greek Cypriot side. On the Turkish Cypriot side, a high-ranking law enforcement official arranged for safe passage, Önal claimed. The cash was later deposited into local banks in northern Cyprus, which do not comply with standard anti-money laundering checks, he said.
‘Games of Chance’
Among the more than 240 suspects indicted last year, Turkish prosecutors identified 35 individuals as “leaders” of the organization. They included Falyali’s widow, Özge Taşker Falyali, as well as the manager of Les Ambassadeurs Casino, Hakan Atici. Both of them face 50-plus year sentences if convicted.
Atici has personally registered dozens of gambling websites, with names like iranbets.com, bet4usa.com, and maradonabet.com, according to domain records. Atici did not respond to requests for comment.
In Önal’s view, both last year’s indictment and the one against him in 2018 served two purposes for Turkish authorities: to confirm that the bribes being paid out by the network were proportionate to its revenues, and to provide a warning to the network that the government could crack down at any time.
“This is just to intimidate Özge,” said Önal. “In other words, to say, 'Don't steal money from us, pay your commission correctly, we know what you earn.'”
Cemil Önal (left) with Özge Taşker Falyali (right).
As further proof that the recent Turkish indictment was “empty,” Önal pointed to the fact that Özge Taşker Falyali was in northern Cyprus, celebrating her 41st birthday, days after the charges were announced. This week, she stood next to the Turkish Cypriot leader at a televised state funeral of a prominent businessman.
The betting operation, Önal said, is now being managed from the United Arab Emirates — a natural choice, given the simplicity of opening bank accounts, setting up companies, and obtaining visas there, all with few questions asked.
Reporters could not independently confirm this claim due to the difficulty of reporting in the UAE, but Özge Taşker Falyali does appear to have a substantial presence in Dubai. According to leaked property records, she owns a dozen luxury properties there, purchased for a total of $62 million in a single year, 2023.
BeteBet, meanwhile, updated the latest iteration of its domain this week, and some wallets identified by Turkish financial investigators in 2022 showed activity as recently as last month.
As for Falyali, when he was alive, suspicion about his involvement in illegal activities appeared to have little impact on his stature in northern Cyprus.
He was not arrested when the United States indicted him and his brother Hüsnün money laundering charges in 2015, and there is no indication that Falyali or his companies were investigated in northern Cyprus. (U.S. authorities dropped the indictment after the murder and declined to comment on the case.)
After Falyali’s murder, senior Turkish Cypriot officials attended his funeral, and his coffin was draped in the red-and-white flags of both northern Cyprus and Turkey.
This story was produced in collaboration with 14 partner media organizations in countries including North Macedonia, Armenia, Malta, Belarus, the Netherlands, and Albania. Reporting by Edik Baghdasaryan (Hetq), Ivan Blazevski (IRL), Julian Bonnici (Amphora Media), Jacob Borg (Times of Malta), Lindita Çela (Shteg.org), Saska Cvetkovska (IRL), David Davidson (FTM), Aylin Elci (Freelance), Margaux Farran (OCCRP), Cevheri Guven (Freelance), Stas Ivashkevich (BIC), Maja Jovanovska (IRL), Yana Mickevich (BIC), Henk Willem Smits (FTM), Tom Stocks (OCCRP), Alina Tsogoeva (OCCRP), Emma Wright (OCCRP), and Kira Zalan (OCCRP).
