iGaming’s most intriguing whodunnit ended season one with a bang this month after Evolution won the years-long battle to reveal its mystery accuser. NEXT.io speaks to chief executive Martin Carlesund on the long road here.
Speaking at Evolution’s unassuming offices in the beating heart of the Swedish economy in Stockholm, Carlesund – the 10-year veteran CEO of one of the world’s largest iGaming companies – is direct. What people say matters. But often, it’s just as important who is talking.
On the screen is the burnt wreckage of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, the Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur flight shot down by Russian-backed forces in 2014, killing all 298 people on board. “When Putin or [Russia’s foreign minister] Lavrov says, ‘We didn’t shoot it down,’ you intuitively know it probably means the opposite,” Carlesund says. “Why do I bring this up? Because sources matter. If your source is Lavrov, you had better be careful.”
The chief executive of the Swedish live casino giant has more reasons than most to have thought deeply about where information comes from. In 2021, the company’s meteoric rise as a public company was dealt a major blow when – from origins unknown – a 121-page report threw a litany of allegations at the business, including that it operated in breach of US sanctions, gave VIPs laptops to gamble in prohibited jurisdictions, and received payments from them in cash.
The document was distributed to gambling regulators and several media outlets, including Bloomberg, causing enormous financial damage to the business and its investors. Since then, Carlesund has led the company on an Odyssean quest to fight back against the defamatory allegations, and to find out who would want to make them in the first place.
Carlesund notes that the only clue ever made public about the identity of the author was a single line in the original Bloomberg story by journalist Christopher Palmeri: that the report had come from an Evolution competitor. “That’s the only statement ever made about it,” Carlesund says. “But you have to be very source-critical, because the person behind the report worked hard and paid a lot of money to hide their identity.”
The monolith
Rewinding the clock to 2021, Carlesund said the business was blindsided by the report, but that crisis management came first.
“It was all hands-on deck; we need a proper investigation. We need to have a press conference, to comment on it, basically to handle the situation, and show that the report’s claims about Evolution were false,” he recalls.
After the initial shock was over, a weeks-long period saw more many billions wiped from Evolution’s market capitalisation.
The first step, Carlesund says, was simply to look at the report. Using The Rock of Guatapé, a gigantic Colombian boulder, as another visual metaphor, he highlights that the report does not contain just one inaccuracy, but attacks the company with multiple false claims “I climbed this on all fours – I’m afraid of heights, but like to challenge myself,” he jokes. “It’s one of the biggest monoliths in the world. It’s one single stone.”
The executive argues the document, in contrast, is not a monolith, but composed of many tiny pieces that could be the basis of legal action. “When you look at it, it’s not like they spelled my name wrong,” he says. “But the fact that they spelled the names right doesn’t matter. It’s about the defamation and lies.”
View of El Peñón de Guatapé, Antioquia in Colombia.
Inside the four-year legal battle
Evolution’s legal battle against white collar litigation firm Calcagni & Kanefsky LLP, which had acted as the report’s public face, began in December 2021 with the filing of a lawsuit against the firm. As the entities actually responsible for the report had shielded themselves from view, the live casino giant instead sued various Jane and John Does in their absence – with the first stage of the battle being to break their anonymity.
After an early legal ruling ordering Calcagni & Kanefsky to disclose the identity of their client and the report’s sponsor, the issue made its way to New Jersey’s appellate courts. The appellate court ordered that before disclosure could be ordered, more information was required, kicking off a phase of legal investigation into the report’s claims.
At the same time, the Department of Gaming Enforcement (DGE) launched its own independent review of the report’s claims. By February 2024, the DGE reached its conclusion: there was “no evidence of inappropriate payments to Evolution by its clients or that Evolution provided devices for customers to illegally use their content,” and no evidence “showing that Evolution took illegal bets from New Jersey, another state, or any other prohibited jurisdiction.”
A year later, in February 2025, the court also found Calcagni & Kanefsky, their client, and the report’s sponsor “prepared and disseminated false allegations about [Evolution’s] business practices that were designed to harm, and did harm, [Evolution’s] business.” As a result, the court ordered the law firm to reveal their client’s identity.
A twist in the tale
By this point, the case had already dragged on for three years. But finally in the following months, Evolution received a “polite letter” from Calcagni & Kanefsky, stating that – while it didn’t know who actually commissioned the report – it could reveal that a company called Black Cube was the investigative entity that put it together.
As private investigators go, Black Cube had a reputation. A London and Tel Aviv-based organisation that prides itself in hiring exclusively from official Israeli state organs, the company advertises its ability to find “creative intelligence”. Amid some worthy-sounding probes undertaken by the firm, it has also had several more dubious clients, including at one point Harvey Weinstein.
While the Black Cube unmasking had peeled back another layer of the onion, the legal process needed to begin again. With no doubt a heavy sense of déjà vu, a new set of questions were sent to Black Cube, this time extending to matters such as payment records throughout, as well as the media outlets who received the report.
Overall, Carlesund is critical of how media covered the original report and subsequent legal proceedings. “The press likes headlines, snippets, and clicks,” he says. “And once a narrative is set, everyone follows it. Very few journalists actually take the time to look at the facts.”
He claims Evolution’s multiple court victories – including its victory over the unmasking question from Black Cube on 3 October – received minimal coverage compared to the initial Bloomberg story. “It wasn’t as clickworthy, but we won again.”
Stay tuned for season two
Carlesund frames the current moment as a season finale, with crucial developments still to come. Now, Evolution can pursue its defamation case in earnest. The financial stakes could be substantial, though Carlesund refuses to discuss potential damages.
The CEO admits he naively thought the process would be shorter and that regulatory clearance would be sufficient to change public perception. “I’ve learned that the modern world is deeply uninterested in truth,” he says. “But that’s also why we’re doing this – to show the truth still matters.”
For now, he’s satisfied with this particular victory. “We never appealed, not once, and we never lost,” he says. “That’s remarkable.”
The next chapter, whenever it arrives, promises to be equally contentious. Until then, Carlesund is content to let the legal process run its course.
“You’ll have to stay tuned for season two,” he says with a slight smile. The show, it seems, is far from over.