A New Jersey court has lifted the confidentiality restrictions on an internal report Evolution commissioned after being accused of letting its games reach prohibited gambling markets. Retired federal judge Robert Kugler, serving as special adjudicator in the company’s long-running dispute with private intelligence firm Black Cube, granted the request on Aug. 20 and ordered three expert witnesses to sit for depositions. The ruling deals with discovery in the case and says nothing about whether Black Cube’s original allegations against Evolution were accurate.
Spectrum Gaming Group wrote the report for Evolution as part of the supplier’s internal review after the allegations first surfaced in 2021. Black Cube already had access to it, along with the material Evolution handed to Spectrum and the New Jersey Division of Gaming Enforcement, but kept pushing to strip away the confidential status. Its argument is that the document contradicts Evolution’s public account of what the internal investigation turned up, while Evolution has maintained throughout that its compliance review found no jurisdictional violations.
Black Cube’s 2021 report accused Evolution of knowingly allowing its games to be accessed through third-party operators in prohibited and sanctioned jurisdictions, Iran among them, along with other markets where online gambling was illegal. Evolution rejected all of it at the time, arguing its games couldn’t be reached from sanctioned countries without deliberate technical manipulation such as VPN use, and stressing that it supplies B2B operators rather than dealing with players directly. Law firm Calcagni & Kanefsky submitted the report to regulators in New Jersey and Pennsylvania.
Court proceedings later revealed who paid for the investigation: Evolution rival Playtech. Evolution has since accused Playtech and Black Cube of running a campaign designed to damage its business, claiming Black Cube received more than £1.8 million for the work and was offered further success payments tied to outcomes including regulatory investigations and media coverage. Playtech rejects the smear campaign characterization and says it acted after receiving serious concerns about Evolution’s business practices.
The New Jersey Division of Gaming Enforcement closed its own investigation in February 2024 without taking any action against Evolution. It found no evidence that the company had sanctioned, promoted, permitted, or materially benefited from its content being offered by operators in jurisdictions it considered prohibited. Evolution did change some compliance processes following the internal review, though the NJDGE said those improvements weren’t connected to jurisdictional violations.
Black Cube revived the allegations after Evolution settled with the UK Gambling Commission for £4.75 million in July 2026. The UKGC found genuine Evolution games running on six websites operated by two companies without British licenses, with large volumes of UK traffic recorded between December 2023 and November 2024. Weaknesses in Evolution’s money laundering risk assessment and supply-chain controls were serious enough that the regulator considered suspending its license, although later testing found nothing further of concern.
An Aug. 3 court filing from Black Cube cited that UK settlement as support for its argument that Evolution hasn’t been fully forthcoming about its regulatory problems. Evolution disputes any link between the two, noting that the UKGC findings cover conduct years after the November 2021 Black Cube report and in an entirely different regulatory market. A later failure to keep games off unlicensed British websites, the company argues, can’t prove that earlier allegations about sanctioned and prohibited jurisdictions were true.
Kugler also ordered Nelson Rose, Joshua Skule, and Ricardo Solano to sit for depositions of up to four hours each, while turning down Evolution’s requests for Black Cube to produce certain audio and video recordings and privileged communications with its lawyers. A separate hearing on Sept. 1 will deal with Black Cube’s attempt to obtain a wider set of Evolution’s communications with gambling regulators, which Evolution has opposed as far too broad. Another hearing under New Jersey’s Uniform Public Expression Protection Act, the state’s anti-SLAPP law, is still scheduled for November.