India’s RMG Ban Pushed Gamblers to Offshore Sites
03 November 2026
India’s ban on real-money gaming did not stamp out demand; it sent it on a detour offshore.
Before 2023, Indian gamblers wagered their rupees on homegrown platforms, but a concerted push to curb online gaming wiped out the domestic market. Eight thousand URLs were blocked from easy access in India, but it didn’t keep offshore operators from claiming those gambling dollars. Bettors from the subcontinent’s digital blackjack and cricket leagues simply hopped across the virtual border.
Offshore online gambling platforms in 2024, such as Parimatch and 1XBet, showed remarkable resilience in the Indian wagering economy with half-baked, spammy-looking apps that locals use for anything from cricket betting to kabaddi to poker. Offshore operators set the odds.
These sites took reckless bets, just like their local competitors. In fact, the offshore operators’ success made a mockery of the Indian government’s heavy-handed prohibition efforts.
There's no shortage of evidence. According to CUTS International, a think tank, the user base of offshore betting sites jumped by 20% in the Delhi region after the ban. In a survey of 1,000 users pre- and post-ban, CUTS found the user base grew from 68.3% to 82.0%. That equates to a 14-point increase in raw terms, or a relative rise of one fifth. Even more telling is that the share of users who bet daily swelled from 3.4% to 42%, implying many see offshore sites as a serious fallback. On average, these offshore bettors played 20 times as long; the share of two-hour sessions went from 3.4% to 44%.
Just 73% of Indians who had used any legal sites before the ban and still bet afterward used offshore sites, according to the market research firm Blask.
These sites open easily, even without a VPN, and support Indian-language interfaces in languages like Hindi, Marathi, Tamil, and Bengali, according to a 2024 report by Brand Equity, the business-review journal of the Economic Times. Indian gamblers can even make deposits via the country’s UPI system or crypto.
To win users, these sites offer enticing bonuses. Parimatch, for example, provides deposit bonuses of 200%, 700%, or even 1,500% according to Economictimes, plus 500 free spins. Odds92 pitches a 1,500% bonus.
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Put simply, the bonanza of betting is still right there, reachable.
Cricket provides a consistent backbone for the market. Offshore platforms gear up for it every Indian Premier League season, reeling in youthful bettors. There, an offer from Stake might let a user wager any amount, but then payout in flat rupees, inevitably to the house's advantage, if the wager landed. Economic reporting also credits celebrity endorsements for driving the market’s growth, though it tied a UAE-based platform, the Mahadev betting app, to a syndicate and multiple legal hassles.
A less effective government effort is to invest in more URL blocking. India’s 8,000 takedowns over a nine-month span after the ban barely scuffed the problem. Alternatives to casinos like coin-toss games and the popular game PUBG have even returned to the App Store.
In the end, politics is a feckless tool to bend the outcome of a game like betting in India, where money and interest belong to that side of the table, caustically across some border. These unruly offshore businesses now command a gaming market once headed by the formerly domestic companies that are now on the ropes.
The Indian government is working to reverse this, sending blocking notices to both Google and Apple. But so far, the apps are still available on both app stores, and advertising monitoring has scarcely slowed the offshore operators' roll. A mid-2024 survey by advertising regulator Advertising Standards Council of India (ASCI) found 3,694 offshore gambling ads in just April to August of last year, with nearly as much in the next six months (3,239 ads). The number of user complaints illustrates the trend’s impertinence: none til September 2023, then 1,335 over the next six months, before climbing to 2,310 from March to August 2024.
None have landed a knockout. The sites remain just as accessible through browsers.