A Personal Approach to “Whales”: How Stake Co-Founder Ed Craven Retained the Biggest Players for Years

A Personal Approach to “Whales”: How Stake Co-Founder Ed Craven Retained the Biggest Players for Years

At the end of 2025, the media space was shaken by an investigation conducted by ABC News Australia. Journalists published confidential correspondence between Ed Craven, one of the creators of the Stake.com platform, and a Swedish millionaire named Chris. The latter was listed as an elite VIP casino client for four years — from 2020 to 2024.

Chris’s story began back in his teenage years. By the age of 17, he had built a fortune trading in-game items and conducting cryptocurrency transactions. Later, his capital grew through successful reinvestments of winnings into Bitcoin and Ethereum, which were experiencing rapid growth at the time.

From the very beginning of his registration on Stake.com, Chris did not hide the scale of his gambling. He openly informed the administration that he had already lost around €2.3 million on a competing platform, Bitcasino. For the then-rapidly developing Stake, such a client was a “gold mine,” so Ed Craven took personal control of communication with him.

According to materials published by ABC News, the content of the chats indicates that Craven knowingly turned a blind eye to clear signs of gambling addiction displayed by the client. Instead of offering help, Chris received generous bonuses and individual limit increases after heavy losses. The most resonant revelation was assistance in bypassing the self-exclusion system: when Chris attempted to restrict his access to gambling, he was allegedly helped to continue placing bets through a “friend’s account.”

At the same time, alongside his gambling activity, Chris acted as a major affiliate, attracting new users to the platform and receiving commission payments in return.

The conflict moved into the legal arena in 2025, when the bankrupt player filed a lawsuit against Stake, demanding €1.5 million in compensation. The casino representatives took a hard line, characterizing Chris as a “professional gambler” who allegedly speculates on the topic of addiction solely to recover his losses. According to Stake, over the entire period of activity on the platform, Chris actually remains in profit by €2.3 million.

Ed Craven and official company representatives declined to provide detailed comments on the case. Meanwhile, industry insiders claim that the practice of direct communication between the co-founder and “whales” continues to this day, although there is currently no documented evidence beyond Chris’s case.