I’m not sure how this makes money overall though since the reward money has to be balanced at the population level so the platform always comes out ahead. I suspect there’s an element of getting the employee to gamble with their own money with promises to pay that don’t materialise.
They know, and expect, on x% they won't make that $200 back. This scheme structured itself on increasing that x% and being low-volume enough for platforms to not catch on or redefine their acquisition programme.
And if you are that real customer that will provide that y, you're going to sign on the platform with the big bonuses.
There was some forum post by a platform's "loss officer" looking for info on this scheme. They suggested anyone taking part was "money laundering", but money laundering is a pretty broadly worded offence. The responses weren't sympathetic to an online casino complaining about losing money on more signups.
Basically has you signup for a bunch of online casinos to get the sign-on/referral promos, but say you're an undercover "tester" for the casino.
Best I can tell, they'll ask you to open up a fresh bank account and coinbase account and they'll fund your buy-ins through USDC that you withdraw yourself. Casinos generally require some amount of play to get the bonus/commissions, so you're "testing" the functionality by playing slots (or they just takeover or remote-coach you on doing it). For sports, it's easy to coordinate off-setting bets that cancel each other out in aggregate at a slight loss. When spread across accounts, this won't be detected.
They probably earn some referral fees on the coinbase and bank account signups too.
It seems you do get paid for the work: they appear too above-board to have virtually zero victim complaints (like actual corporate year-ends on UK's Companies House, corps, mgmt that seem to be real people) and the fraud is just against the casinos. They'll subtly suggest you keep some payment at some of the casinos to withdraw or play, because if you play, the referrer often gets a cut of your losses.
Nice way to get "natural" looking signups and geographically diverse signups that are hard to detect.
I got an invite on Linkedin, and I had a bit of trouble trying to figure out the scheme, so there you have it. Didn't do the "interview" but it was surprisingly polished. Big money in gambling and Customer Acquisition Cost is huge.