The Great Gamblers

When I lived in Mumbai a few years ago, a paan-cigarette shop near my home would attract an unusually large crowd during the Indian Premier League (IPL) matches. Discreet inquiries revealed that the owner was a bookie, accepting bets while slathering kaththha-choona on magahi leaves.
The modus operandi is quite different now. The IPL has become a major trigger for betting activities in India, a market reportedly worth over $100 billion.
Online gaming is categorised into two types – ‘games of skill’, which require expertise and are legal; and ‘games of chance’, which rely on random factors, include live betting and are illegal. Most fantasy gaming apps available on app stores fall under the ‘games of skill’ type, but there is heightened fear that the youth tend to get addicted to them, eventually turning them into ‘games of chance’. Many online betting platforms operate in a legal grey area, exploiting loopholes by classifying themselves as ‘games of skill’, rather than ‘games of chance’.
The online betting landscape
According to a report released by the Digital India Foundation, deposits in illegal betting and gambling have reached that staggering figure per year and are growing at an annual rate of 30%.
Just four betting platforms – Parimatch, Stake, 1xBet, and Battery Bet – received 1.6 billion visits in just three months, between October and December 2024.
Social media platforms like Facebook, Meta, and Telegram drove 42.8 million visits to these four platforms during the same period.
Organic search traffic accounted for nearly 184 million visits, driven by high-ranking search results. Illegal operators use aggressive SEO tactics to rank highly for searches like “best IPL betting site” and “online casino without KYC,” maximising visibility and attracting users.
Referral traffic generated ~247.5 million visits, primarily from adult sites, gambling affiliates and promotions on sports and video streaming platforms.
1.098 billion visits to illegal platforms originated from users directly entering URLs, which is an indication of how successful past marketing efforts and referrals are.
And it’s not just Indian fans placing bets. The entire cricket-loving world gets involved through international online betting sites. Many of these platforms operate through cryptocurrency, making it harder to trace where the money is going.
The most striking aspect of online betting apps is that they have created an easy pathway to gambling on live sports, which is otherwise illegal in India.
The legality of gambling in India hinges on the distinction between game of skill and game of chance. Games of skill, in which players use their memory, knowledge, judgment or expertise to make decisions, are constitutionally protected by a Supreme Court judgment dating back to 1996. In 2022, the Supreme Court held that fantasy sports were games of skill. This is where the popular platform and sponsor of the Indian cricket team Dream 11 operates – and it’s campaign featuring multiple Bollywood stars and cricketers has the advertising world agog.
The online betting landscape
Games of chance – such as live betting, where outcomes are based on luck, enjoy no such protection. There are many players, including foreign-based platforms like William Hill and Ladbrokes. Prediction markets like Probo offer all-or-nothing binary options on a variety of actual outcomes. People place real-money bets by withdrawing cash from their bank accounts and instantaneously crediting the betting site.
The real game happens in the shadows.
In WhatsApp groups, and on Telegram Messengers or on random mirror websites during the IPL – there’s a parallel world operating at lightning speed. This unregulated, illegal betting economy is 20x bigger than the legal one, according to the Digital India Foundation report. It is built on cryptocurrency transactions, mule bank accounts, offshore platforms and anonymous UPI handles. These platforms offer live odds for every ball. You can bet whether a no-ball will be bowled in the 17th over or if Sanju Samson will hit a six in his next two balls.
According to ASCI’s Half-Yearly Report for 2024-25, illegal betting and gambling advertisements have surged across digital media in new formats.
In response, ASCI flagged 890 such ads to the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting for further action. Among them, 831 Instagram posts featured betting tickers, redirecting users to offshore betting platforms. These tags and tickers frequently appear on fan and community pages, with some page owners reportedly earning between INR 2,000 and INR 3,000 per day for displaying these logos.
Enforcement gaps become even more evident in the case of user-generated content. The distinction between commercially-driven user-generated promotions and organic content is usually unclear, and platforms have largely adopted a hands-off approach. This allows influencers and affiliates to promote illegal gambling and betting under the guise of personal expression.
Challenges faced by payment platforms
One of the biggest enablers for betting during IPL in the recent past is UPI (Unified Payments Interface), India’s popular instant payment system. UPI makes betting easier than ever. It allows anyone transfer money with just one tap. It’s super-fast, which is making the job of the punters easy.
People can now place bets with as little as $1 or as much as $1 million instantly.
UPI already handles over $3 trillion worth of transactions every year. But during IPL, this number reportedly goes even higher, and that’s where the problem lies.
This frenzied activity is a strain on lenders’ IT departments. To help complete in-match wagers quickly, they have to make sure customers’ money reaches the destination bank over India’s Unified Payments Interface, a public utility shared by more than 600 institutions.
While cricket fans are watching sixes and wickets, banks are busy watching something else, the money trails. Banks which hold the accounts of legitimate betting sites are under pressure from clients to not miss any of the funds coming their way. It is turning out to be an operational nightmare – banks have been struggling with outages because of the sudden rise in UPI transactions during the ongoing IPL 2025 season. There were at least two major outages in the last 20 days. One of them happened during a match between Gujarat Titans (GT) and Rajasthan Royals (RR), the same game GT ended up winning by 58 runs. The UPI was down for 95 minutes during the game.
Banks are also doing a different kind of analysis. They’re trying to map the money flow. While the RBI is tightening data regulations, while the Enforcement Directorate chases down crypto-linked laundering and the Supreme Court keeps getting pulled into “game of skill vs chance” debates, the illegal networks are faster.
They run mirror sites, change domains every day, route money through mule accounts, and use influencers on YouTube and Telegram to gain trust.
Betting is no longer an under-the-table operation. It’s in the cloud, mobile, UPI, and every city. What India needs today is not just regulation, but education, enforcement, and evolution. Because for every ball bowled by Kuldeep Yadav or Josh Hazlewood, there are a hundred thousand people betting a thousand rupees on it.
And this game, unlike cricket, has no third umpire.
Kunal Sinha is Chief Knowledge Officer at Ampersand Advisory, based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. He is the author of several books including The Future of India’s Rural Markets and Raw – Pervasive Creativity in Asia. He writes for MxMIndia every other Monday. His views here are personal.