BSP shuts 8,000 accounts in illegal casino crackdown

The Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) shut more than 8,000 merchant accounts after finding they were being used as payment fronts for unregistered and unlicensed online casino operators. The accounts belonged to ordinary retail businesses, including beauty salons, bakeries, and small stores. These merchants were effectively acting as payment nodes, routing funds to gray-market iGaming operators who cannot access legitimate payment rails.

The BSP is now moving beyond this account shutdown. A second, forward-looking measure is tightening how payment service providers (PSPs) are required to assess the payment channels they onboard. This is a direct response to what the central bank describes as a proliferation of casino micro-payments flowing through nominally non-gaming merchants.

This is the most significant payment-layer enforcement action against gray-market iGaming in the Philippines in recent memory. Previous enforcement tended to target operators directly, through PAGCOR licensing actions or DICT-led site blocks. Targeting the payment layer is structurally different and harder to route around.