The Morning Brief Banned But Booming: How The Money Gaming Crackdown Created an Offshore Goldmine
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Mar 10, 2026 Ajay Raag, a payments and money-flows reporter, and Disha Acharya, an investigative journalist on offshore gaming, unpack how offshore platforms evaded India’s ban. They discuss mirror sites, regional interfaces and seamless UPI flows. They examine mule-account networks, massive user traffic from India, enforcement gaps and the ban’s industry fallout.
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Offshore Platforms Evaded The Ban With Simple Access Tricks
- Offshore betting platforms easily bypassed the Indian ban by operating outside India and using mirror sites to replace blocked domains quickly.
- Disha Acharya found many sites require only a mobile number and OTP and offer regional-language interfaces, making access feel native to Indian users.
Local Language Interfaces And Seamless Payments Drive Adoption
- Platforms actively target Indian users by offering interfaces in Hindi, Marathi, Tamil and Bengali and heavy social media promotion.
- Ajay Raag noted seamless UPI, netbanking and wallet deposits make payments indistinguishable from ordinary online purchases.
Parimatch Outpaced Major Indian Platforms
- Parimatch reported more traffic from India than Amazon, X, LinkedIn, Hotstar, Quora and Reddit, illustrating how dominant offshore platforms became.
- Disha Acharya used this comparison to show how unexpectedly large Indian user engagement was for a betting site.