The Centre has blocked around 300 websites and mobile platforms related to online betting in its latest crackdown since it tightened norms around illegal online gambling last year.
The affected platforms were allegedly involved in a number of illegal activities, including online sports betting, satta/matka gambling networks, casino-style gaming—with slots, roulettes, and live dealer tables—and betting exchanges functioning as peer-to-peer betting marketplaces.
This comes after the Centre in January blocked more than 200 such sites over similar concerns of “illegal betting and gambling”.
This brings the total number of such websites blocked to 8,400.
Notably, more than half of these websites (about 4,900) were blocked after the passage of the Promotion and Regulation of Online Gaming Act, government sources said.
The Promotion and Regulation of Online Gaming (PROG) Act 2025 was a vital legislation introduced in October last year, which made a distinction between e-sports, legitimate online gaming applications, and illegal betting platforms.
While "e-sports" have been defined as "organised competitive events between individuals or teams" that do not involve real-money, "bets, wagers or any other stakes", an "online game" has been defined as a game played on a digital device and operated using the Internet.
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However, illegal online betting applications, which are called "online money games" in the PROG Act 2025, have been defined as online games—excluding e-sports—that involve bets, wagers, or any other stakes.
It also remains unclear to what extent illegal betting sites have stayed blocked, because these platforms draw in users into a world of unregulated transactions often siphoned offshore, and because of constant URL switching, which operators of the gambling sites use to change their domains and circumvent the PROG Act 2025.
