An İstanbul court has frozen the assets of the PayCo electronic payment company and several suspects as part of an investigation into alleged money laundering and illegal betting, the prosecutor’s office said on Friday.
Eleven suspects have been detained across four provinces in simultaneous raids as part of the investigation conducted by the İstanbul Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office’s Financial Crimes and Anti-Terror Financing Bureau.
The company executives are accused of violating the law on illegal betting and laundering the proceeds of a crime.
— İstanbul Cumhuriyet Başsavcılığı (@istanbulCBS) December 5, 2025
To protect evidence and ensure the integrity of the investigation, prosecutors also ordered the seizure of assets belonging to the suspects and to PayCo. The measure was approved by an İstanbul criminal judgeship of peace.
PayCo, founded in 2020 and based in İstanbul’s Ataşehir district, is a private financial-technology company with 51 to 200 employees, according to its LinkedIn profile. The firm provides a range of payment services, including e-wallets, QR code systems, virtual and mobile POS solutions, link-based payment systems and POS integration tools.
The investigation into PayCo is being conducted based on reports from Turkey’s central bank and the Financial Crimes Investigation Board (MASAK) which, according to the İstanbul Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office, have revealed that income from illegal betting, unlicensed forex schemes and fraud had been funneled through electronic money and payment service providers.
Prosecutors said the reports suggested the funds were systematically moved through these platforms and then laundered through numerous domestic and foreign companies.
The findings showed that the activities were not isolated individual transactions but part of an “organized structure,” the prosecutor’s office said, citing the scale of the financial flows, the number of actors involved and the continuity of the operations.
Prosecutors also said the evidence pointed to a criminal network within the electronic money company that included one suspected leader, three senior managers and seven operational members.
Investigators reported detecting multiple high-risk financial transactions believed to be linked to criminal activity.
The operation against PayCo is the latest in a series of high-profile investigations into financial institutions and digital platforms accused of enabling illegal activities in Turkey’s expanding fintech and online gaming sectors.