A Malta or Curaçao Licence Stops at the Turkish Border

Each offence in article 5 of Law no. 7258 opens with the same condition: it is punished where the conduct is carried out without relying on authority conferred by law. The authority that sentence refers to is Turkish authority — the Spor Toto licensing structure. A licence from the Malta Gaming Authority or a Curaçao master licence authorises an operation under Maltese or Curaçao law. It is not the authority article 5 has in mind, and it does not answer the question the article asks.

TCK 8 completes the picture: an offence is committed in Türkiye where the act is wholly or partly carried out here, or where the result occurs here. Ordinary remote work satisfies both limbs. The servers may sit in Malta and the company may be registered in Curaçao, but if the shift is worked from a desk in Şişli and the players reached are in Türkiye, part of the act and the whole of the result are here.

The charge is not drawn from your job title. It is drawn from what the file says the work consisted of.

If the product is casino-style rather than sport — slots, roulette, card games — the file may be built on TCK 228 instead. Under TCK 228/6, gambling means games played for gain in which profit and loss depend on chance; a sports market falls outside that definition, because the outcome is not purely chance-based. Where the offence is committed through the use of information systems, TCK 228/3 carries three to five years and a judicial fine of one thousand to ten thousand days, and 228/4 increases the sentence by half where it is committed within the activity of an organisation.

The day counts are not a formality. Under TCK 52 a judicial fine is a number of days multiplied by a daily amount the court fixes according to your economic and personal circumstances, currently between one hundred and five hundred lira.

Two exposures attach to the employment arrangement rather than to the betting.

The work permit

Remote employment by a foreign company, performed from Türkiye, is work performed in Türkiye. Under Law no. 6458, article 54, a deportation decision is taken — the wording is mandatory — in respect of, among others, foreigners assessed as constituting a threat to public order or public security, those who have earned their living by illegitimate means while in Türkiye, and those found to have worked without a work permit. Those are three separate grounds, and the last does not wait for a criminal verdict. Under Law no. 6735, the employer is fined for each worker — six thousand lira in the figure enacted in 2016, uprated annually and doubled on repetition — the workers are reported to the Ministry of Interior for removal, and the employer is made liable for their accommodation and return travel. The immigration file runs on its own track; see deportation and entry bans.

The salary route

Where wages, bonuses or player funds moved through an account in your name, article 5/c stands on its own facts: intermediating in the transfer of money connected with such games, three to five years. If the money is characterised as proceeds, TCK 282 can be added — three to seven years and a judicial fine of up to twenty thousand days for concealing the origin of assets derived from an offence carrying six months or more, and two to five years for knowingly acquiring, holding or using them, doubled where it is found to have been done within the activity of a criminal organisation. Under TCK 282/6, a person who enables the assets to be recovered before prosecution begins is not punished for the laundering offence; that door closes once the prosecution starts. By then the account is usually already restrained — seizure under CMK 128 expressly reaches any kind of account at a bank or other financial institution, and how a laundering allegation is assembled is a separate question from the betting charge itself.

Article 5 makes CMK 128, 135, 139 and 140 available for the offences in 5/a to 5/ç and for TCK 228/3 and 228/4: seizure of accounts, rights and receivables; detection, interception and recording of communications; the appointment of an undercover investigator, expressly whether or not the offence was committed within the activity of an organisation; and surveillance by technical means. Those measures run for months before anyone is detained. Alongside them, the workplace is sealed and closed for three months by the senior civil administrator without prior warning, the access-blocking provisions of Law no. 5651 apply, and the Spor Toto Teşkilat Başkanlığı may apply directly to the prosecutor, object to a decision not to prosecute, and be admitted to the case as an intervener.

Two questions then decide the range. Under TCK 220, membership of an organisation formed to commit offences carries two to five years on its own, and an organisation requires at least three people with a structure, membership and means capable of committing the intended offences — a payroll is not by itself any of that. Under TCK 39, a person who merely aids an offence has the sentence reduced by half, subject to an eight-year ceiling. Where the same offence is repeated on a single decision to offend, TCK 43 produces one sentence increased by one quarter to three quarters, rather than a separate sentence for every shift worked.

It is worth knowing where that leaves the end of the case. Suspension under TCK 51 and deferral of the judgment under CMK 231 both require a sentence of two years or less. The lower limits of 5/a, 5/b and 5/c all sit above that line, and it becomes reachable only through the reductions in the Code, and only in some files. That is why the work is done at the characterisation stage — on which paragraph the conduct belongs to and what role the file can actually establish — rather than at sentencing. The full structure of the offences, the confiscation rules and the procedural consequences are set out on our page on illegal betting and gambling charges.