The Isle of Man, which built online gambling into one of the largest pillars of its economy, is grappling with a sprawling scandal after one of its flagship licensees was linked to scam operations run from the island, according to an investigation published Thursday by Bloomberg Businessweek.

The scandal centers on King Gaming Ltd., an online casino operator that became the target of the largest law enforcement operation in the island’s history in April 2024, when dozens of British police secretly crossed from England and raided the company’s offices in the capital, Douglas. About 40 workers were detained for questioning by immigration authorities and seven people were arrested, though no one has been charged in the UK or the Isle of Man, according to the report.

The raid followed a Beijing court judgment that found six former King Gaming employees guilty of defrauding victims in China of more than $5 million from an operation based in Douglas, the news outlet reported. The judgment described the company as a “criminal organization.”

Since the raid, 55 companies operating on the island have surrendered their online gambling licenses or had them revoked—an increase of more than 150 percent over the average cancellation rate in the preceding four years, according to Businessweek. In May 2025, the Manx government issued a National Risk Appetite statement declaring limited tolerance for online casinos owned or controlled from East or Southeast Asia, citing an increasingly complex criminal landscape in the region.

The investigation, based in part on a cache of internal King Gaming emails, detailed close ties between the company and the island’s political and regulatory establishment. King Gaming was co-founded in 2017 by Mark Robson, who had been the government’s head of e-gaming, and Bill Morgan, a Chinese-born businessman previously named Liang Lingfei who took Dominican Republic citizenship in 2016, Businessweek said. 

In 2018, Morgan was named president of the chamber of commerce of the Golden Triangle Special Economic Zone in Laos, an enclave notorious for drug trafficking and cybercrime, Businessweek reported. The chamber’s chairman, Zhao Wei, and his companies had been sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department earlier that year, largely over their management of the zone, according to the report. 

King Gaming also shared an office with, and paid more than 76,000 pounds ($102,000) to, a recruitment firm co-owned by then-Treasury Minister Alfred Cannan, whose department oversaw the gambling regulator, and his wife, according to invoices and emails cited by Businessweek. Cannan is currently the Isle of Man’s chief minister. The company also hired Mark Varley, the Gambling Supervision Commission inspector assigned to monitor it, interviewing him while he still held that role. 

Varley later returned to government and now serves on a governmental team investigating international money laundering, including the King Gaming case, according to the report. 

The media outlet also reported that the government extended King Gaming as much as 5.92 million pounds in state funds and tax breaks during the pandemic, that a fired director’s whistleblower complaint to the regulator in late 2020 went without follow-up, and that visa applications for workers the company imported from the Philippines in 2021 contained red flags, including work permits tied to a firm whose owner has been accused in the Philippine Senate of organized crime links.