India’s Real-Money Ban Backfires: Offshore Ads Surge 34% After PROGA

India’s Real-Money Ban Backfires: Offshore Betting Ads Surge 34% After PROGA Takes Effect

When Indian lawmakers pushed through the Prevention of Real-Money Gaming Act — widely referred to in the trade as PROGA — the stated ambition was unambiguous: drive unlicensed, offshore gambling operators out of the country’s vast consumer market. The reality, as emerging advertising-intelligence data now suggests, has been starkly different. Since the legislation came into force, the volume of offshore real-money gaming advertisements reaching Indian consumers has risen by roughly 34 per cent, a figure that regulators, consumer-protection advocates and the domestic gaming industry are all struggling to reconcile with the law’s original intent.

The surge is being interpreted across the industry not as a sign of brazen defiance by operators, but as a structural consequence of how the law was designed — and, critically, of the enforcement machinery that was, or was not, put in place alongside it.

What PROGA Was Supposed to Do

India has long occupied an uneasy position in global gaming markets. Its population of well over a billion people, a rapidly expanding middle class, growing smartphone penetration and an appetite for cricket-adjacent sports betting have made it one of the most coveted untapped jurisdictions on earth. Domestic fantasy sports platforms have operated in a legal grey zone that the Supreme Court partly illuminated, but real-money casino-style products and fixed-odds sports wagering have never sat comfortably within any clear regulatory framework.

PROGA was designed to resolve that ambiguity on the restrictive side of the ledger. The act prohibits the offering of real-money gaming services to Indian residents by unlicensed entities — which in practice means almost every offshore sportsbook and online casino that has been aggressively targeting Indian consumers for the better part of a decade. Operators serving India from jurisdictions such as Malta, Gibraltar, Curaçao and the Isle of Man fall squarely within its intended scope. The law also placed obligations on payment processors and, in theory, on digital advertising platforms to refuse business from prohibited operators.

On paper, it was a coherent architecture. In practice, the architecture appears to have several load-bearing walls missing.

The Advertising Surge: What the Numbers Indicate

Advertising-intelligence firms that monitor programmatic display, social-media and streaming-platform spend have tracked a meaningful uptick in offshore gaming creatives served to Indian IP addresses in the months following PROGA’s implementation. The approximate 34 per cent increase — measured against a comparable pre-PROGA baseline — is not evenly distributed across channels. The sharpest growth has been recorded in two areas: influencer-led campaigns on short-form video platforms, and programmatic display advertising routed through intermediary ad networks that obscure the ultimate advertiser’s identity.

Both channels are particularly difficult to police. Influencer marketing sits in a regulatory gap: individual content creators are rarely classified as advertising intermediaries under the act, even when they are directly compensated to promote offshore betting products to their followings. Programmatic supply chains, meanwhile, can involve half a dozen or more technology vendors between an operator’s media buy and the eventual publisher, making it genuinely difficult for any single party in the chain to claim full knowledge of the end advertiser’s compliance status.

There is also a simpler dynamic at play. With a number of domestic real-money operators either pausing operations or curtailing marketing spend while they seek legal clarity, offshore brands have effectively experienced a reduction in competitive noise. The advertising landscape for Indian consumers has, paradoxically, become less crowded with compliant messaging and more cluttered with non-compliant alternatives.

Enforcement: The Structural Gap

Observers who have studied PROGA’s implementation point to several specific weaknesses in how the law translates from statute to enforcement action.

Payment Blocking Has Proven Porous

The act tasks financial institutions with identifying and blocking transactions to prohibited operators. However, offshore platforms have responded with a by-now-familiar toolkit: cryptocurrency payment rails, peer-to-peer transfer networks, virtual prepaid instruments and the routing of funds through shell merchant category codes. Indian banks and payment aggregators have limited capacity — and, in some cases, limited incentive — to conduct the forensic-level transaction monitoring that effective blocking requires.

DNS Blocking Is Easily Circumvented

DNS Blocking Is Easily Circumvented

Domain-level blocking orders have been issued against a number of high-profile offshore sites. The impact has been modest. Virtual private networks are freely available, widely understood by Indian gaming audiences and trivially easy to deploy on mobile devices. Some operators have taken the additional step of mirror-site rotation — cycling through new domains faster than blocking orders can be processed — a technique honed in other restrictive markets including parts of Southeast Asia and Eastern Europe.

The Advertising Platform Problem

PROGA’s provisions relating to digital advertising intermediaries have attracted particular criticism from compliance professionals. The act obliges “advertising platforms” to refuse to carry promotional content from prohibited operators, but the definition of what constitutes an advertising platform is narrow enough that a substantial portion of the ecosystem — including many programmatic exchanges, affiliate networks and social platforms headquartered outside India — may fall outside its direct jurisdiction. Platforms based in the United States or European Union are subject to Indian law only insofar as Indian courts can compel compliance, which remains a contested and largely unresolved area.

Consumer Harm and the Demand-Side Reality

The policy debate about PROGA has tended to focus on the supply side — what operators are doing, how regulators are responding, what technology can and cannot achieve. Less attention has been given to demand-side dynamics, which arguably determine the law’s ultimate efficacy more than any enforcement mechanism.

India has a substantial population of active online gaming consumers, many of whom engaged with offshore platforms before PROGA and have shown little inclination to stop doing so afterwards. Research from comparable markets — including Australia following the Interactive Gambling Act’s tightening, and Germany following its 2021 State Treaty on Gambling — consistently suggests that supply-side restrictions without accessible, well-regulated domestic alternatives tend to shift consumer activity to less safe environments rather than eliminating it.

Responsible gambling infrastructure among the offshore platforms now advertising most aggressively into India varies enormously. Some hold licences from respected jurisdictions and maintain meaningful consumer protection standards. Others operate under minimally scrutinised Curaçao sub-licences with thin or non-existent harm-reduction provisions. Indian consumers navigating this landscape without a regulated domestic framework to anchor their choices are, by most measures, more exposed to potential harm than they would be under a functional licensing regime.

Industry Voices: Domestic Operators in Limbo

The domestic gaming industry’s reaction to the advertising surge has been a mixture of frustration and grim vindication. Indian-founded operators and fantasy sports platforms that had been pushing for a licensing model — one that would allow them to offer regulated real-money products while offshore rivals were excluded — find themselves in an uncomfortable position. PROGA has constrained their operations without delivering the competitive relief they were promised.

Several industry bodies have written to the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology and to the Ministry of Finance requesting urgent clarification on how the act applies to skill-based games with a monetary component, and calling for accelerated action against offshore advertising. The tone of those communications, according to people familiar with the correspondence, has grown considerably sharper in recent months.

There is also a tax-revenue dimension that some within government are beginning to take seriously. Offshore platforms pay no goods and services tax on revenues generated from Indian consumers. Every rupee wagered on an unregulated offshore site is a rupee that generates no domestic fiscal return and no consumer protection obligation. The contrast with a functional licensing model — under which operators would contribute to the exchequer and adhere to harm-reduction standards — is stark, and it is an argument that proponents of regulatory reform are deploying with increasing frequency.

Comparative Context: Lessons From Other Markets

India is not the first major market to discover that prohibition without a parallel licensing pathway tends to produce unintended consequences. The pattern is well documented.

• Australia tightened its Interactive Gambling Act to prohibit in-play sports betting and certain casino products. Offshore operators responded by restructuring product offerings to remain technically accessible, and VPN usage among Australian gamblers rose sharply in the years that followed.
• Germany spent years attempting to enforce a de facto online casino monopoly that courts progressively undermined. When a workable licensing framework finally arrived via the Interstate Treaty, channelisation — the proportion of activity captured within the regulated market — proved disappointing in early years, partly because unlicensed operators had embedded themselves deeply in the consumer psyche during the preceding grey-market period.
• The Netherlands delayed market opening by several years while attempting to clean up operator behaviour in advance. The delay achieved little in terms of reducing offshore market share and arguably entrenched the position of operators who had built brand recognition during the hiatus.

The common thread in each case is that demand does not extinguish itself in the absence of supply. It reroutes. And the rerouted demand typically ends up in environments with weaker consumer protections than a well-designed licensing regime would have delivered.

What Comes Next for Indian Gaming Policy

There are credible signals that at least some policymakers in New Delhi are reassessing the PROGA framework in light of the post-implementation data. Consultations are understood to be ongoing regarding amendments that would create a licensing pathway for certain categories of online gaming — potentially including sports wagering — alongside strengthened penalties for advertising intermediaries found to be carrying prohibited content.

Whether those consultations result in meaningful legislative action is a separate question. Indian gaming regulation has historically moved slowly, hampered by the constitutional division of powers between the central government and state legislatures, by competing commercial interests, and by the political sensitivity of any measure that can be framed as the state endorsing gambling.

What the 34 per cent advertising surge makes difficult to ignore, however, is that the current approach is not working on its own terms. The objective was to reduce Indian consumers’ exposure to unregulated real-money gaming products. By that measure, PROGA has, at least in its current form and implementation, achieved the opposite. Acknowledging that openly — and drawing the appropriate policy conclusions — will require a degree of institutional candour that has not always been in ready supply when gaming regulation is the subject.

The offshore operators watching from Malta, Gibraltar and Curaçao are, for now, continuing to advertise.