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India’s goods and services tax (GST) authority has announced measures against hundreds of online gambling operators and frozen $14m in associated mule accounts.
The Directorate General of Goods and Services Tax Intelligence (DGGI) announced on Saturday (March 22) that its intensifying enforcement campaign against foreign and domestic operators includes new arrests, the blocking of hundreds of websites and the freezing of thousands of bank accounts.
The DGGI said three Indian nationals have been arrested for running India-facing gambling platforms in unnamed foreign locations, although it did not name them or the time and place of their detention.
The three suspects, and other wanted individuals, targeted Indian customers via the Satguru, Mahakaal and Abhi247 “online money gaming platforms” and deployed “mule” bank accounts to remit funds from gamblers, it said, likely including accounts co-opted without the owners’ knowledge.
The DGGI said it has blocked 166 mule accounts linked to these networks.
The GST organ said it also blocked almost 2,000 additional bank accounts linked to 357 offshore gambling websites for “failing to register [with the DGGI], concealing taxable pay-ins, and bypassing tax obligations”.
The DGGI blocked the accounts in cooperation with the National Payments Corporation of India and the Indian Cybercrime Coordination Centre (I4C), while the websites were blocked in conjunction with the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), it said.
In addition, the DGGI has frozen more than 1.2bn rupees ($14.2m) held in 392 bank accounts of likely gamblers whose United Payments Interface (UPI) identification numbers matched numbers discovered on the websites.
The UPI system is India’s ubiquitous, decade-old peer-to-peer and B2C instant payments mechanism with hundreds of millions of users.
The DGGI said that, overall, it is investigating some 700 offshore online gambling entities targeting Indian customers, and the current wave of arrests and prosecutions applies to a subset of those entities.
The advanced degree of coordination with multiple government agencies indicates that the Indian government has embarked on a more powerful and comprehensive sweep of online gambling offenders than previously seen.
But with the approach of the 2025 Indian Premier League cricket season, the DGGI has also weighed in on a burgeoning connection between illegal online gaming operations and celebrity endorsements.
This lucrative and infamous nexus has developed with impunity over many years amid government inaction, but more aggressive intervention of late has prompted the peak bodies representing regulated gaming industries to band together in a repudiation of the practice and a commitment to actively oppose it.
“It has been observed that many Bollywood celebrities and cricketers, along with YouTube, WhatsApp, and Instagram influencers, are found endorsing these platforms,” the DGGI statement said.
“And therefore the public is advised to remain cautious and not engage with offshore online money gaming platforms as it may jeopardise their personal finances and indirectly support activities that undermine financial integrity and national security.”
The DGGI actions, peak body cooperation, Enforcement Directorate investigations into money laundering and payments channels, and pending Supreme Court rulings on application of the GST to online skill gaming and wider legality of online real-money gaming, all conform with the wider global phenomenon of dwindling grey market space for foreign and domestic online gambling interests.
