Is Stake.com legitimate in Nigeria?

What the licence is actually worth

Stake is a real, large operator running under a real licence number, and the licence's standing on its own regulator's register is not clean. Both halves of that sentence matter, so take them in order.

The company

Clause 1.1 of the terms of service names Medium Rare N.V., a Curacao company at Seru Loraweg 17 B with registration number 145353. That registration number is corroborated: it appears against the same company name on the Curacao Gaming Authority licence register dated 20 August 2026, published from the authority's own register page.

Payments are handled by two Cypriot agents named in the same clause, Medium Rare Limited of Nicosia, registration HE 410775, and MRS Tech Ltd of Larnaca, registration HE 477481. The operator's compliance statement dates the business to 2017 and claims service in more than 169 countries; both are operator claims rather than verified figures.

What no document available to us establishes is who ultimately owns any of it. No group parent and no beneficial owner is named on a company or regulator page we could check, and the entities we can confirm, including Sweepsteaks Limited in Cyprus and STAKE BRAZIL LTDA, are not linked by any published holding structure.

The licence, precisely

The register row for OGL/2024/1451/0918 names Medium Rare N.V. as the licensee, classes the licence as B2C, carries the company number 145353, gives 9 December 2025 as the date of issue, prints 9 June 2026 as the expiry, and records the status as assessment in progress.

We checked on 22 August 2026, by which point the printed expiry was more than two months in the past. The authority attaches its own caveat to these overviews, stating they do not confirm that the licences listed are currently valid.

So three things are true at once: the number Stake publishes is genuine, the licensee matches the company in the contract, and the register does not show a licence in force on the date we looked. Whether a renewal has been granted since is not resolvable from the public record, and we assert nothing either way.

One point in the operator's favour: the enforcement register published by the same authority on 10 July 2026 holds no entry for the company, so nothing has been recorded against it in that document.

Contradictions between Stake's own properties

• Curacao issues the licence and clause 14.3 of the terms lists Curacao as a place from which nobody may play. The regulating country and the served countries are deliberately separate.
• stake.bet repeats the same clause and the same licence number under the same company, per the stake.bet terms.
• stake.us names no gambling licence at any point in its terms, for the straightforward reason that it is a sweepstakes operation run by Sweepsteaks Limited of Larnaka: Gold Coins hold no monetary value, Stake Cash redeems for prizes, no purchase is necessary, and the age floor is 21. The iOS listing for that product nonetheless shows an 18+ rating, which the pages do not reconcile.
• Brazil is the outlier in a good way. STAKE BRAZIL LTDA, CNPJ 56.525.936/0001-90, holds a federal fixed odds authorisation covering stake.bet.br, granted under Portaria SPA/MF number 263, which is dated 7 February 2025, with effect from the start of that year, confirmed on the Ministry of Finance authorisation list. Brazilian players have a domestic regulator.
• Great Britain is closed. The white label behind the British site ran through TGP Europe Ltd, which surrendered its GB licence in May 2025 instead of paying a 3.3 million GBP penalty over third party due diligence and money laundering failures, and the Gambling Commission stated that sites formerly licensed through it can no longer lawfully offer gambling to consumers in Great Britain. The British site had already closed to customers on 11 March 2025, after reports in February 2025 that the licence would be given up following an investigation into a Stake branded video featuring an adult performer. Stake continues to sponsor Everton, with a three year sleeve deal reported in July 2026, and says it does not take bets in the UK.

Security history and recourse

In September 2023 roughly 41 million USD was taken from Stake, and the FBI attributed the theft to the Lazarus Group and APT38, North Korean state cyber actors, and published 33 blockchain addresses that held the proceeds.

A co founder of the business said at the time that no private keys had been taken and pointed instead to a service with authority over hot wallet transactions, as reported then. Player funds were honoured, which is to the operator's credit; the incident still tells you the balance you leave on site carries custody risk.

Your recourse, finally, is thin. Clause 23.1 names [email protected] and no independent adjudicator; clause 25.1 puts disputes in Curacao courts under Curacao law. Independent sentiment is middling rather than damning: Trustpilot showed 4.0 across 17,792 reviews when we checked it on 22 August 2026.

Stake is not a scam by any evidence we hold; it is an operator whose accountability rests almost entirely on its own commercial interest in paying.