Bulgaria’s gambling regulator has demonstrated commendable due diligence, the result of a newly-revised gambling framework.
A total of 3,890 people were said to have been detected in land-based casinos in the first half of 2025, at a time when they were supposed to be hospitalised. Total visits amounted to 22,000, as revealed by the gambling regulator, the National Revenue Agency (NRA).
This has resulted in an investigation launched by the National Health Insurance Fund (NHIF) into a potential fraud involving insured patients. This type of fraud is done through the use of personal information to administer fictitious hospitalisations, which is then used to illicitly draw money from the NHIF.
The discrepancies have been identified through the mandatory visitor registration under the current legislation, where each person visiting a land-based venue needs to provide a valid ID document for every visit. The operator then uploads this to the NRA servers.
Licensed casinos are legally required to be connected to these servers at all times, where they also upload real-time activity reports on deposits and payouts for each registered player account.
Bulgaria’s gambling framework was revised last year for the first time in almost a decade, and closer collaboration between the NRA and government bodies regarding the sector was one of the key agreements.
Still, NHIF Deputy Governor Prof. Momchil Mavrov urged the media to abstain from hasty conclusions about fraud, as investigations are still ongoing and it could be a matter of patients breaking the rules on their own accord.
“Let’s not call them fraudulent hospitalisations yet, this is just one version which we’ve been working on with the NRA over the last six months,” Mavrov said.
“The data was given to us by the NRA. We calculate the duration of the hospitalisations, while our colleagues give us indisputable evidence of the persons’ physical presence in casinos at that time.
“It is undoubtedly proven that people who were supposed to be under a hospitalisation that has a specific start and end date were present in casino halls. This must be further investigated.
“The reason could be that patients voluntarily left a hospital’s premises, overcoming the control measures of the medical institutions.”
The total cost of the identified hospitalisations was around BGN 7m (£3.1m), Mavrov further confirmed.
SBC News has reached out to the NRA for a comment.