India Offshore Betting Ads Surge After Real-Money Ban

⏱ 3 min read

India's ban on online real-money gaming has not silenced offshore betting operators — it has made their advertising louder. New data from the Advertising Standards Council of India (ASCI) shows offshore gambling platforms ran an average of 795 advertisements per month in the four months after the Promotion and Regulation of Online Gaming Act (PROGA) came into force in August 2025, up from 594 ads per month in the eight months before. The figures, published in ASCI's annual complaints report on 1 June 2026, confirm that prohibition accelerated, rather than dampened, the sector's marketing aggression.

Over the full monitoring period from January to December 2025, ASCI identified 7,927 offshore betting advertisements in violation of national advertising guidelines — the single largest violative category, accounting for 72.14% of all cases requiring modification. The regulator also flagged 854 influencer accounts actively promoting illegal offshore platforms in under nine months.

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Meta Is the Primary Battlefield for Offshore Betting Ads

Platform-level data in the ASCI report reveals a striking concentration of illegal gambling promotion on one network. Meta — Facebook and Instagram combined — accounted for 79.84% of all violative advertisements identified, with sponsored ad formats running at high volume even after PROGA took effect. Advertising volumes on most other platforms declined; Meta was the clear exception. ASCI noted that offshore operators routinely rotated across multiple domains, accounts, and IP addresses to outlast individual takedown orders.

Platform	Share of Violative Ads	Post-Ban Trend
Meta (Facebook / Instagram)	79.84%	Remained high after PROGA
Google	8.11%	Volumes declined post-ban
Websites	6.17%	Operators shift to mirror domains
X (formerly Twitter)	2.53%	Volumes declined post-ban
Mobile Applications	1.53%	App-based distribution growing
YouTube	0.95%	Influencer content primary vector

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Demand Shifted, Not Reduced

The advertising surge tracks directly with documented player migration. A March 2026 multi-state study by CUTS International of 3,000 former real-money gaming users across Delhi NCR, Tamil Nadu, and Maharashtra found offshore platform usage had risen from 67.6% pre-ban to 85.6% post-ban — with Maharashtra reaching 92%. Daily engagement on offshore sites jumped from 3.4% to 42.3%. The share of users spending ₹5,000–₹9,999 per month on offshore platforms climbed from 7.6% to 26.2%, and a new high-spend bracket above ₹10,000 per month — absent before the ban — appeared in 13.5% of respondents.

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The Numbers Behind the Offshore Betting Enforcement Gap

MeitY disclosed in a Lok Sabha reply on 1 April 2026 that 8,376 URLs linked to betting and gambling had been blocked or actioned as of 28 March 2026, with more than 4,800 of those blocks occurring post-PROGA. Despite that volume, users bypass restrictions through mirror domains and UPI payment rails that remain accessible to offshore operators. Industry analysts at a September 2025 MediaNama panel estimated the offshore market at a conservative $20 billion, with annual tax evasion exceeding $4 billion — more than the total revenues of India's domestic sector at peak. Within the first 90 days of the ban, domestic RMG platforms recorded combined asset write-downs of more than $840 million.

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What Comes Next: DGRA Licensing and Payment Controls

The Promotion and Regulation of Online Gaming Rules 2026 came into force on 1 May 2026, establishing the Digital Gaming Regulatory Authority (DGRA) in New Delhi. The first licensing window opens on 15 July 2026, accepting applications through 30 September. Category A skill-game licences carry a ₹5 crore ($600,000) fee at 20% GGR tax; Category B hybrid licences cost ₹15 crore at 25% GGR. Critically, the rules empower the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) to block payment processing for unlicensed operators — a mechanism modelled on the UK's credit card gambling ban. Whether that tool proves more durable than URL blocking will depend on cooperation from domestic payment aggregators and, above all, from Meta.

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Sources

Primary regulatory and research sources used in this report, listed in order of authority.

The ban did not reduce gaming or betting behaviour — it merely pushed users into darker, less regulated corners of the internet.

— Policy researcher, cited in Storyboard18 · January 2026