Prohibition and participation are rising together across large parts of Asia. China, India, Indonesia and Thailand all treat most forms of online betting as criminal offenses, yet regulators in each country have independently documented tens of billions of dollars a year moving through the exact activity they are trying to stamp out. Our read of the available regulatory, UN and market-research data suggests bans are reshaping where the money goes and who profits from it, not whether the money exists at all.
Key takeaways
- India’s Promotion and Regulation of Online Gaming Act, 2025 imposes a blanket ban on real-money games, threatening an industry sized at roughly $23 billion, while independent estimates put annual illegal cricket-betting deposits near $100 billion.
- China blocked over 4,500 illegal gambling platforms and arrested more than 11,000 people in 2024 alone, on top of nearly $99 billion in legal state lottery sales the same year.
- Indonesia’s financial-crime regulator PPATK tracked Rp286.84 trillion (about $19 billion) in online gambling turnover in 2025, involving 12.3 million depositors, despite a nationwide blocking campaign.
- A 2026 UNODC report estimates scam-and-gambling-adjacent losses across East and Southeast Asia at $88.3–$114.1 billion for 2025, much of it run from fortified compounds in the Mekong region.
- Enforcement volume and market volume are rising in parallel, which is the empirical signature of substitution rather than suppression.
Table of contents
What “restricted” actually means across Asia
“Restricted” covers very different legal architectures in this region, and the differences matter for understanding where the money actually goes.
All forms of commercial gambling for profit are criminally illegal in mainland China under Article 303 of the Criminal Law, with the only permitted activities being two state-run monopolies, the China Welfare Lottery and the China Sports Lottery.
India’s approach is newer and broader:
the Promotion and Regulation of Online Gaming Act, 2025 was enacted with the objective of promoting e-sports and online social games while prohibiting online money games, and it comprehensively prohibits all forms of online money games, whether involving games of chance, games of skill, or any combination thereof.
Indonesia and Thailand sit somewhere in between — gambling is illegal under general law, but enforcement is delegated to financial-intelligence and telecoms agencies rather than a single gaming regulator.
That legal patchwork is exactly why comparing jurisdictions is useful. Each government publishes its own enforcement statistics, and when read together they describe a region where the ban is real, the enforcement is real, and the market is real — simultaneously. For a broader look at how licensing regimes diverge worldwide, see our licensing and jurisdictions hub.
The scale of the shadow market
The Asia-Pacific region is already the largest legal-plus-illegal online gambling market in the world by several measures.
The Asia Pacific online gambling market size reached USD 26.11 billion in 2025 and is expected to reach USD 59.75 billion by 2034.
China alone commands 36.7% of that regional share
— a striking figure given that almost none of it is legally licensed operator revenue.
Independent industry research puts the unlicensed component far higher than official market-size figures capture.
In India, where betting on cricket is largely outlawed, annual deposits in illegal gambling are estimated at nearly $100 billion.
China, where only state-run lotteries are legal, recorded nearly $99 billion in lottery sales last year, yet gambling addiction rates of 2.5 to 4 percent — well above Western averages — suggest the underground market remains vast.
Indonesia’s financial-crime unit has been unusually transparent about its own numbers:
PPATK said the total amount of money circulated through online gambling during 2025 reached Rp286.84 trillion ($19bn), a decline from Rp359.81 trillion ($24bn) in 2024.
A total of 12.3 million people made online gambling deposits through banks, e-wallets and QR-code payment channels in 2025 alone.
Cumulatively,
PPATK reported online gambling transactions in Indonesia reaching IDR 927 trillion ($56.5 billion) between 2017 and the first quarter of 2025.
India’s ban has direct commercial stakes attached.
India’s lower house of parliament passed a sweeping online gaming bill that, while promoting esports and casual gaming without monetary stakes, imposes a blanket ban on real-money games, threatening to disrupt billions of dollars in investment in an industry sized around $23 billion.
Legal challenges are already underway, and how courts rule will shape whether displaced demand moves offshore or partially re-legalizes.
A region-by-region snapshot
| Jurisdiction | Legal status of online betting | Recent enforcement data point | Estimated market activity |
|---|---|---|---|
| China | Criminal offense outside two state lotteries | In 2024, China’s Ministry of Public Security blocked more than 4,500 illegal gambling websites and arrested more than 11,000 people involved in their operations. |
Nearly $99 billion in legal lottery sales , plus an unquantified illegal layer |
| India | Blanket ban on real-money games under the 2025 Act | Offering online money games carries up to three years imprisonment and a ₹1 crore fine; advertising banned games carries up to two years and a ₹50 lakh fine. |
Nearly $100 billion in annual illegal deposits estimated |
| Indonesia | Illegal under general electronic-transactions law | Regulators have blocked more than 7.2 million pieces of related content | Rp286.84 trillion (~$19bn) in 2025 turnover |
| Thailand | Illegal under the Gambling Act; poker banned nationwide in October 2025 | Between 1 October 2025 and 11 January 2026, Thailand’s Ministry of Digital Economy and Society blocked 220,486 illegal URLs, of which 183,977 were linked to online gambling. | More than THB150 billion (about $4.8 billion) lost annually to online gambling |
| Philippines | Domestic iGaming licensed under PAGCOR; offshore POGO licenses banned in 2024 | President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. banned offshore gambling websites in July 2024. | Domestic gross gaming revenue grew nearly 25% year-over-year to $7.16 billion in 2024. |
Why bans do not suppress demand
The pattern across these jurisdictions is that enforcement intensity and market volume move together rather than in opposite directions. China’s case is the clearest illustration.
By 2024 and 2025, enforcement had reached what industry analysts described as a “war-scale” operation, involving nationwide task forces and cross-border coordination, and in 2024 alone Chinese authorities shut down more than 4,500 illegal online gambling platforms.
The scale of individual prosecutions is also growing:
the extradition of Chinese-Cambodian businessman She Zhijiang, accused of running more than 200 online gambling platforms, saw him returned from Thailand to China in November 2025, with prosecutors describing his network as a national security threat that siphoned billions of yuan offshore.
Japan illustrates the same dynamic on a smaller scale, driven partly by information gaps rather than access barriers.
Annual wagering volumes there were estimated at ¥1.2 trillion (roughly $8.2 billion USD), and the Japanese government has treated this as a growing concern, largely attributing the problem to a lack of public awareness.
Awareness campaigns have not eliminated demand;
a 2022 national awareness campaign led to a wave of media scrutiny, and in September 2023 a popular YouTuber was arrested for live-streaming online casino gameplay, the first high-profile case in a broader crackdown.
Indonesia’s own regulator frames the problem in almost identical terms to China’s, despite very different legal traditions: enforcement reduces measured turnover for a period, then new platforms and payment rails appear.
PPATK announced that online gambling transactions were reduced to Rp155 trillion in 2025, down sharply from Rp359 trillion in 2024, which officials attributed to stronger coordination among state institutions.
Yet
422.1 million individual online gambling transactions were still recorded during 2025
— a volume that suggests displacement to new channels rather than genuine demand destruction. Our related analysis on black market betting and unlicensed crypto casinos covers the payment-rail migration pattern in more detail.
The scam-center connection
The most consequential finding in recent research is that unlicensed gambling infrastructure in restricted Asian markets increasingly overlaps with organized fraud and human-trafficking operations, not just recreational betting. A July 2026 UNODC report puts a number on the combined damage:
combined annual losses from scam offenses across East Asia, South-East Asia, Australia, and New Zealand are estimated at between USD 88.3 billion and USD 114.1 billion for 2025 alone, a sum that, even at the low end, outstrips the GDP of several countries in the region.
UNODC’s own analysts describe the boundary between gambling and fraud as functionally erased:
“The line between online gaming and online gambling is becoming more and more blurred,” while online gaming initially refers to interactive digital play without mandatory monetary stakes, the two sectors have converged through design features that deliberately exploit this ambiguity.
The human cost documented alongside these figures is severe.
The “scam industry” has grown to industrial proportions, with credible estimates pointing to at least 300,000 people working in operations across Southeast Asia, most concentrated in the Mekong region.
Calculating exact profits is difficult, but some sources estimate global annual revenues at around $64 billion, with the Mekong region alone possibly worth more than $43.8 billion a year.
Cross-border cooperation has produced large-scale but only partial repatriations:
more than 7,600 Chinese nationals were repatriated in 2025 through coordinated efforts with Thailand and Myawaddy in Myanmar, an area notorious for gambling and telecoms fraud operations.
Readers interested in how these criminal networks intersect with payment infrastructure can find more context in our technology, payments and crypto gambling coverage and our regional deep dives hub.
What this means for players
For an experienced player based in or wagering from a restricted Asian jurisdiction, the practical risk profile is different from that in a mature regulated market. There is no licensing authority to appeal to, no segregated-funds requirement, and — as the UNODC data shows — a non-trivial chance that an “offshore casino” domain is operated by, or adjacent to, a criminal network rather than a conventional gaming company. India’s new legal framework raises the stakes further:
the government has cited concerns over addiction, financial distress, money laundering, and unlawful data transfers, and has also linked online gaming platforms to the financing of terrorism in certain cases.
Whatever one thinks of the proportionality of a blanket ban, the underlying risk factors it cites are consistent with what regulators in China, Indonesia and Thailand have independently documented.
None of this means every operator serving these markets is a scam front — licensed operators in the Philippines and Macau, for example, remain conventional commercial businesses under PAGCOR and DICJ oversight respectively. It does mean that “restricted” should be read by players as a materially higher-risk category, not simply an inconvenience to route around. Our security, fraud detection and fair play hub explains the signals our algorithm uses to separate licensed operators from grey-market imitators.
Frequently asked questions
Why is illegal betting so large in countries that ban it outright?
Bans remove licensed competition but do not remove smartphone access, cross-border payment rails, or cultural demand for betting, particularly around cricket and football.
Estimated annual illegal deposits in India alone reach nearly $100 billion
, showing that prohibition redirects rather than eliminates activity.
If China only allows state lotteries, why do illegal platforms still exist?
State lotteries satisfy only a narrow segment of demand — fixed-odds draws — while unlicensed platforms offer sports betting, live casino and poker that the state monopoly does not provide.
Nearly $99 billion in legal lottery sales coexists with addiction rates of 2.5 to 4 percent, well above Western averages.
Are all unlicensed Asian gambling sites linked to scam compounds?
Not all, but the overlap is significant and growing according to UN researchers.
Combined annual losses from scam offenses across East and South-East Asia, Australia and New Zealand are estimated at USD 88.3–114.1 billion for 2025
, with casinos and unregulated gambling sites identified as core infrastructure in that ecosystem.
Will India’s 2025 gaming ban actually stop real-money betting?
The law is being challenged in India’s Supreme Court, and enforcement precedent elsewhere in Asia suggests demand typically migrates to offshore or crypto-based platforms rather than disappearing.
The ban threatens an industry sized around $23 billion
, and history in China and Indonesia points to substitution rather than suppression.
Methodology
GamblScout.com’s scoring engine does not treat “licensed” versus “restricted” as a binary flag; it weights the regulatory strength of the issuing jurisdiction, cross-references domain and payment-processor data against sanctions and enforcement lists from bodies such as UNODC and national financial-intelligence units, and applies NLP sentiment analysis to player and forum reports of withheld withdrawals or unreachable support. For a full breakdown of how these signals are weighted, see our scoring system and algorithmic weights page and our data scraping and technical engine hub.
Gambling involves risk. Only play with money you can afford to lose and use the deposit limits and self-exclusion tools available in your jurisdiction.
