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A Berlin court has ruled against the Malta Gaming Authority in its bid to stop German researcher Lilith Wittmann from linking it to organized crime, according to her account. Wittmann said she may also keep using documents taken from the regulator’s systems, but may not access them again.
Key Takeaways
- A Berlin court ruled for Lilith Wittmann in the Malta Gaming Authority’s injunction case, she said.
- Wittmann said she may keep using the Malta documents and calling the MGA an “organized crime enablement scheme.”
- The court reportedly barred her from accessing MGA systems again; the judgment itself has not been published.
What the Berlin Court Decided, and What Remains Unclear
Wittmann, the Berlin-based security researcher behind this week’s “Casino Secrets” leak from Curaçao’s gambling regulator, announced the result on X on Friday.
“Just received the verdict in Malta Gaming Authority v. Wittmann,” she wrote. “Good news: I can call the MGA an organized crime enablement scheme—and use the documents I obtained. Bad news: I’m not allowed to hack them again.”
A screenshot of the judgment’s first page, which Wittmann posted, identifies the case as 7 O 254/26 eV at the Landgericht Berlin II, a judgment issued in interim injunction proceedings. The applicants are the Malta Gaming Authority, represented by CEO Charles Mizzi, and Mizzi himself, with Bird & Bird LLP acting for both. The operative part of the ruling is not shown, and the full judgment has not been published, so the veracity of the outcome rests on Wittmann’s account.
The dispute stems from Wittmann’s breach of an internal MGA system in March 2026, a separate intrusion from the Curaçao breach behind Casino Secrets, a site revealing the inner regulatory workings of Curaçao-based online casinos and the licensing process. The Maltese regulator obtained an interim injunction against her, which she said was aimed at her public claims that it enables organized crime and at preventing further access to its systems. She contested this, and the court heard her objection on Sept. 10, when, she wrote at the time, the judge set out a preliminary view without ruling.
Wittmann has called the case a SLAPP—a common acronym for “strategic lawsuit against public participation,” meaning a lawsuit meant to silence criticism—and said it has run to roughly 2,000 pages of court documents and cost her $17,000 to $22,700 (15,000 to 20,000 euros, at Sept. 24 rates) in legal fees. She said a loss could have exposed her to a penalty of $284,000 (250,000 euros) or six months in prison, which made this week’s publications risky. Of the hacking itself, she wrote that it is “something I have no intention to do again any time soon.”
Casino Secrets Website Goes Down
Hours after the verdict, the archive’s original address went offline. Registry records show casinosecrets.lol was placed on “server hold,” a suspension applied at the registry level, at 12:05 UTC on Friday. Wittmann said the .lol registry, XYZ, had moved faster than Cloudflare. She had questioned earlier in the week whether it would keep the site online because, per her framing, most of the illegal casinos are its customers. The leaked database is now live at curacaofiles.com, a domain registered in December 2025, and is still served through Cloudflare.
The Maltese regulator oversees 311 active licensees, according to Next.io, and the island nation’s famed iGaming “shield” has been repeatedly challenged in German-facing disputes this year. The EU’s top court ruled in April that a German player can reclaim losses from a Malta-licensed operator, and an Advocate General called Malta’s law shielding its operators from foreign judgments “manifestly incompatible” with EU rules.
Wittmann has used roughly 3,000 documents from the MGA’s systems in her reporting, including filings she says identify the owner behind Platincasino, the brand at the center of her German investigation. Frankfurt prosecutors searched 11 properties and arrested a main suspect on Sept. 8 over alleged illegal online gambling involving about $6.66 billion (5.86 billion euros) in stakes, without naming the casino; Wittmann’s reporting links the case to Platincasino.
The Malta Gaming Authority has not commented publicly on the ruling. Its Curaçao counterpart, which tightened its rules for crypto casinos in June and whose portal Wittmann accessed from December 2025 to September 2026, called that breach “a serious breach under Curaçao law” in a Sept. 22 statement and said it would report it to the relevant authorities.
Searchable records from the Curaçao files went online on Wednesday, as the named companies and the regulator pushed back against the findings as the controversy continues to brew.
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