Illegal online gambling surges in India

[The Buzz]

Illegal online gambling is booming in India, with an estimated 5.8 billion visits to the top 15 platforms and their mirror sites between April 2024 and March 2025. This surge highlights how operators are exploiting legislative loopholes and deftly sidestepping existing regulations.

From Asia Gaming Brief:

Direct traffic has proven to be the largest source of user engagement for illegal online gambling in India, with some 3.57 billion visits (or 66 percent of total traffic) registered during the April 2024-March 2025 period. This includes users manually entering URLs, using bookmarks or copying links from private channels.

The success of this is based on ‘an illusion of trustworthiness’, ‘unsolicited marketing practices’, ‘private channel’ distribution (such as through WhatsApp or Telegram), mass media advertising (including TV and billboard adverts), celebrity endorsements and word-of mouth referrals.

Search traffic brought in some 652.2 million visits, with Google having 97 percent market share in this regard. This causes concerns over the fact that illegal gambling platforms ‘are successfully indexed and ranked high in search results, aided by aggressive SEO tactics and weak enforcement by search engines’.

Read more here: https://agbrief.com/intel/deep-dive/...months-report/