India Online Gaming Ban: 8,376 URLs Blocked, Ads Came Back

Four and a half months into the India online gaming ban, the Enforcement Directorate searched 17 addresses linked to the Cyprus-based betting site Parimatch on September 2 and froze ₹37 crore in bank balances. Eight days later, 1xBet’s Indian account on X was running a ₹500-per-winner giveaway on a women’s Asia Cup semifinal, with entry by posting a prediction and a 1xBet account ID. Parimatch’s own Indian handle posted a promotion the day after that.

Parliament passed the Promotion and Regulation of Online Gaming Act thirteen months ago, and it has carried criminal penalties since May 1, 2026. The government’s own records show what it has done since: 8,376 URLs blocked, an advisory to VPN providers, celebrity investigations, three rounds of searches on a single operator’s payment network. Two independent surveys, the advertising regulator’s own count and the ED’s own account of the money trail show what that produced. This article puts the two ledgers side by side.

What the law bans, and what India has done to enforce it

The Act passed the Lok Sabha on August 20, 2025 and the Rajya Sabha the next day, and received presidential assent on August 22. It prohibits every “online money game,” whether of skill, chance or both, along with their advertising and any payment processing for them. Banks and payment systems are barred from handling the money. The Rules were notified on April 22, 2026, and the Act and Rules took force together on May 1, 2026, when the Online Gaming Authority of India was constituted. Some outlets still print an October 1, 2025 start date that was announced in 2025 but never notified.

The penalties are criminal. Offering or facilitating an online money game carries up to three years in prison or a fine of up to ₹1 crore, or both, and repeat offenses carry a minimum of three years with fines of ₹1 crore to ₹2 crore. Advertising one carries up to two years or ₹50 lakh. The Press Information Bureau’s explainer on the Rules puts the government’s case in two numbers: “around 45 crore people” affected by money games, with losses “exceeding Rs. 20,000 crores.” The same document sizes the whole online gaming market at ₹232 billion in 2024, 77% of it from transaction-based games.

The largest operators did not wait for May. Dream11, Mobile Premier League, Zupee, WinZO and Games24x7 suspended real-money play within a day of the bill passing in August 2025. That removed the companies the law could reach. What follows is the record of everything since aimed at the ones it could not.

Two things stand out in that list. Every item is a block, an advisory, a takedown or a search on the payment side; none is a prosecution of an offshore operator under the new Act. And the counts are the agencies’ own cumulative claims, which the rest of this article tests against what happened to demand.

The ads came back with the cricket

The Advertising Standards Council of India, the self-regulatory body that monitors advertising under a memorandum with the gaming federations and escalates violations to the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting and the Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre, counted 7,927 offshore betting advertisements in calendar 2025. The 6,933 it flagged between April and December 2025 made offshore betting the largest violative category in its annual report, at 72.14% of every ad found in breach. The monthly rate did not fall after the law. Violative ads averaged 594 a month in the eight months before the Act and 795 a month in the four months after it.

“In spite of a new law, offshore operators continue advertising at scale and target Indian consumers.”

— Advertising Standards Council of India, Annual Complaints Report 2025-26

The report also counted 854 influencers promoting offshore betting between April and December 2025, some of them accounts that did nothing else, and located 79.84% of the violative ads on Meta platforms, 8.11% on Google, 6.17% on websites and 2.53% on X. Television carried two betting spots in the year after the Act; print and streaming services carried none. The problem is a digital one, and it is concentrated on one company’s ad inventory.

Month-by-month data ASCI supplied to the trade title Exchange4media in August shows the shape of it. ASCI reported 4,858 gambling and betting ads in the year after the Act, 65% of them in the first three months. The count fell through the winter, reached zero in February 2026, and stayed at one or two a month through the spring. Then the cricket calendar filled up again: 220 in June and 182 in July.

Exchange4media’s count of the calendar puts at least 71 India matches between the Women’s Asia Cup, which ended on September 13, and the end of the Australia Test series in March 2027. Namita Viswanath, a partner at the law firm CMS INDUSLAW, told the outlet that the operators’ marketing playbook “is increasingly skewed towards channels that are harder to police: Telegram groups that push tips, live odds and payment instructions at scale; and Instagram and other social feeds that appear to be generic sports update pages but have users funnelled to betting apps.” Technology and gaming lawyer Jay Sayta was blunter in the same piece.

“It is important that the government acknowledges the impossibility of banning all online betting platforms, and continuously monitoring thousands of such websites/apps, and that enforcement of PROGA has been a failure.”

— Jay Sayta, technology and gaming lawyer, to Exchange4media, August 25, 2026

The 1xBet giveaway on September 10 fits the pattern ASCI describes: a cricket hook, a prize in rupees, and a mechanic that requires an account. The post drew 162 likes and 172 replies. Every reply is a public confirmation that a registered Indian account still exists.

Demand did not leave. It moved.

CUTS International, a Jaipur-based consumer research group, surveyed 1,000 former real-money gaming users in Delhi NCR in December 2025 and 1,000 more in Tamil Nadu in January 2026. In Delhi NCR, offshore use rose from 68.3% of respondents before the ban to 82.0% after it. The frequency shift is the larger finding. Before the ban 3.4% used offshore sites daily; after it 42.3% did, and the share playing sessions of more than two hours went from 3.4% to 44%.

Spending followed. Before the ban, 7.6% of offshore users spent ₹5,000 to ₹9,999 a month and none reported more than ₹10,000. After it, 26.2% were in the ₹5,000 to ₹9,999 band, 7.2% spent ₹10,000 to ₹24,999 and 6.3% spent ₹25,000 or more. The Tamil Nadu survey found the same direction: 67.8% to 83.0%, a rise of 15.2 percentage points, with 26.9% of respondents saying they started using offshore sites only after the ban. Several outlets have reported the Tamil Nadu figure as a “15.2% rise”; the CUTS report states it in percentage points.

Traffic data points the same way. Storyboard18 reported in January that one mirror of 1xBet drew about 228,000 monthly visits from India between October and December 2025 and a Parimatch mirror close to 300,000, and that India supplied 13.48% of Stake’s 234.3 million quarterly visits worldwide, second only to Canada. Those are one outlet’s figures from commercial traffic estimates and should be read as orders of magnitude, not audited counts. They sit inside a global unregulated market that regulators reach only a fraction of.

The supply side is not hard to find either. In May, ThePrint profiled a Hyderabad bookie who runs a Telegram group of more than 1.2 lakh members and adds five a day. “Our platform offers 24-hour withdrawal, in case the bet is going too well. There is no PAN card needed for withdrawal,” he told the outlet. That is the pitch a licensed Indian operator was never allowed to make, and it is now the only pitch in the market. Readers weighing any site can start with our guide to checking whether an operator is licensed; an operator taking Indian deposits today is, by definition, not licensed for it.

How the money still moves

Banks are barred from processing payments for money games, so the question is how a Cyprus-based site takes rupees at scale. The Enforcement Directorate has answered it twice this year, in its press release of May 27 and in its statement after the September 2 searches.

“Parimatch and its associates adopted a complex network of mule accounts, payment intermediaries and financial inclusion channels for collection, layering and transfer of user funds.”

— Enforcement Directorate, Mumbai Zonal Office, press release of May 27, 2026

The May release describes deposits and withdrawals passing through current accounts opened in the names of software, fintech and technology companies that also did genuine business; payouts pushed through Business Correspondent networks, Grahak Seva Kendras, mobile money-transfer agents and kirana stores; and cash collected by Cash Management Service agents set off against bank transfers sourced from player deposits, then moved abroad through hawala. In some cases a withdrawing player was paid directly from other players’ fresh deposits, in several tranches, so no money ever left an account the platform controlled. The same release says Parimatch marketed through surrogate brands, “Parimatch Sports” and “Parimatch News,” sponsored local cricket leagues in more than 15 states, and placed ads inside quick-commerce apps at the moment of order placement.

The September statement added two side routes. At least ₹8,200 crore moved through the bank accounts of two Indian tour-and-travel operators, credited by payment intermediaries for services never provided while the operators’ overseas clients paid Parimatch’s handlers in cash abroad. Around ₹500 crore went out as sham overseas direct investment and bogus service imports, backed by fabricated valuation reports. Cash was converted into USDT through hawala and crypto operators and sent to wallets the ED says the network controls offshore. The Financial Action Task Force’s September paper on gaming and gambling risks lists this mule-account and hawala pattern among the 123 red flags it asks banks to watch.

Set against that description, the recoveries are small. The ED’s May release says the platform was “generating over Rs. 3000 Crore in a year.” Three rounds of searches have frozen or seized about ₹150 crore in total: ₹112 crore by the time of the May 27 release, which covered ₹1.56 crore seized and ₹3.8 crore frozen in the May 26 searches, then ₹2.11 crore seized (including ₹61 lakh in cash and a one-kilogram gold bar) and ₹37 crore frozen after September 2. These are the agency’s allegations at the investigation stage; no court has ruled on them.

The rails are also the target of an enforcement stream that predates the Act. The Home Ministry’s cyber-crime centre, I4C, has been freezing mule accounts for years; Business Standard put the running total at 4.5 lakh accounts in November 2024, and the420.in, citing I4C data, reported 1.33 million frozen through 2025. In August, Mumbai Police announced two cases in a fortnight: 12 arrests in a Goa-run cash-out gang on August 7, and on August 20 a racket selling account kits marketed for “online gaming / cricket betting / casino” use that had moved ₹25.45 crore through 17 of 110 mule accounts in under two months. Both were charged under the IT Act and the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, not the new gaming law. India is not alone in aiming at the plumbing; Nigeria’s regulator went after the payment rails the same month.

The courts have started to police the freezes too. On September 2 the Bombay High Court quashed an ED order freezing about ₹100 crore of Coda Payments India’s assets in a case about unauthorised game top-up deductions, where the ten underlying FIRs totalled about ₹25 lakh and the only one still pending involved ₹85,650. The freeze was “ex-facie excessive and disproportionate,” the bench of Justices A S Gadkari and Kamal Khata found, according to Storyboard18. A company’s turnover, the court said, does not become proceeds of crime because the company is under investigation. For gaming firms and payment intermediaries facing coercive action, that is a reference point.

Where blocking did work

The ban has produced two clean exits, and both involved counterparties with a legal address. On April 25, 2026, MeitY warned VPN providers that “certain users are circumventing the legal restrictions imposed on such platforms by misusing VPN services,” named Polymarket among the blocked prediction-market platforms, and said intermediaries that failed their due-diligence duties could lose the safe-harbour protection of section 79 of the IT Act. A ministry official told ThePrint on May 21 that a blocking order had been issued to Polymarket and that one for Kalshi would follow. Kalshi said on May 22 that it had received no takedown request and was in talks with the government. Its member agreement dated June 17 added India to its restricted jurisdictions, the 55th on the list, according to Gambling Insider, citing Bloomberg. That reversed part of the 140-country expansion Kalshi announced in October 2025.

The second was the app stores. In early May, Apple removed Dream11, MPL, WinZO, Zupee and My11Circle from its India App Store, according to Exchange4media, even though the companies had already dropped paid play. A New York exchange with a compliance department and a Cupertino storefront both answer an Indian government letter. A Cyprus operator marketing through Telegram tipsters and mule accounts does not, and that is the whole difference between the two ledgers.

What comes next

Four dates matter. The cricket calendar runs through March. The GST Council meets on October 7, moved from September 12 because of the BRICS summit, with the gaming industry’s legacy tax dues from the pre-ban years on its watch list. The Supreme Court agreed on August 5 to a final hearing of the constitutional challenge to the Act before a bench led by Chief Justice Surya Kant and Justice Joymalya Bagchi, but has not fixed the date. The same bench is carrying a public-interest petition from the Centre for Accountability and Systemic Change asking the court to make the government act against roughly 2,000 apps it says still run betting in India; the Centre had not filed a reply as of that hearing.

One number is missing from the record. In four and a half months, we found no publicly reported first information report filed under the new Act itself; the arrests that made news in Hyderabad, Mumbai and Ahmedabad were charged under state gaming laws, the IT Act or the penal code. MeitY’s public communication on the law has not moved past its early-May explainers of the Rules. The Telangana chief minister told the state assembly in March that 1,456 betting-app cases and 51 suicides had been recorded since 2023, which is the frame the government wrote the law in, and Al Jazeera’s September 12 feature on families ruined by offshore apps shows the human cost inside that frame. The record above shows how far the law has reached the operators responsible. Brazil, which is weighing a prohibition of its own, has that record to consult.

FAQs

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Sources

• A New Era of Online Gaming Governance: explainer on the Promotion and Regulation of Online Gaming Rules, 2026 (April 30, 2026) — Press Information Bureau, Government of India
• Promotion and Regulation of Online Gaming Rules, 2026 notified (April 22, 2026) — Press Information Bureau, Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology
• Lok Sabha Unstarred Question No. 6037, “Offshore Digital Platform,” answered April 1, 2026 (PDF of the official annex) — Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology
• Press release on search operations in the Parimatch case (May 27, 2026, PDF) — Directorate of Enforcement, Mumbai Zonal Office
• Statement on the September 2, 2026 searches in the Parimatch case — Directorate of Enforcement, official account
• ED conducts raids across cities in Parimatch money laundering case (August 12, 2025) — All India Radio News, Prasar Bharati
• ED attaches assets worth over Rs 7.93 crore in betting case (December 19, 2025) — All India Radio News, Prasar Bharati
• Annual Complaints Report 2025-26 (PDF) — Advertising Standards Council of India
• Half-Yearly Complaints Report 2025-26, April to September 2025 (PDF) — Advertising Standards Council of India
• Access to Offshore Betting Websites after the Online Gaming Ban: A Survey-Based Analysis (Delhi NCR) (PDF) — CUTS International
• Access to Offshore Betting Websites after the Online Gaming Ban: A Survey-Based Analysis (Tamil Nadu) (PDF) — CUTS International
• I4C and RBIH sign MoU to strengthen AI-driven detection of mule accounts (May 12, 2026) — Press Information Bureau, Ministry of Home Affairs