Nepal Has Blocked 223,568 Betting Sites – Operators Keep Coming Back

Key Points

• The Nepalese government has blocked 223,568 betting apps and websites from March 2026 onwards, with the recent blocking being of Mostbet, Megapari, 22Bet and Parimatch according to Prime Minister Shah’s 100-point reform package.
• Operators keep coming up with new domains despite the several crackdowns and the NTA uses threat intelligence solutions and deploys ISP employees to its own offices.
• Authorities are now pursuing the influencer and advertising networks that built offshore betting audiences in Nepal, signalling the crackdown is shifting beyond simple domain blocks.

Apart from these betting apps and websites, over 200 others were banned by the telecommunications regulator in the recent enforcement drive. However, hidden behind these numbers is a statistic that paints a very complex picture. The number of platforms that have been banned since March 2026 is over 223,568. According to officials at the Nepal Telecommunications Authority (NTA), many new gambling sites pop up just as quickly as the others are banned.

The NTA directed the internet service providers to block the list of recently added websites within 24 hours. It involved major offshore brands such as Mostbet, Megapari, 22Bet and Parimatch. The enforcement falls under Point 42 of the 100-point Governance Reform Action Plan which was approved during the first cabinet meeting in March 2026 following the assumption of power of the new Prime Minister Balendra Shah. None of these actions affects Nepal’s legal position since gambling had been banned in the country under the Civil Criminal Code 2017 for close to a decade now. What changed is the approach to enforcing this ban.

Five Months, Five Waves, One Number That Keeps Climbing

The March 27 cabinet decision set an unusual standard: all betting platforms had to be blocked within 24 hours of identification, with the Ministry of Communication and Information Technology issuing the directive directly to the NTA. Within days, the NTA coordinated with every internet service provider in the country to begin disabling platforms simultaneously, rather than one by one through court orders as had previously been the practice.

By early April 2026, NTA Deputy Director Surya Prasad Lamichhane confirmed over 7,000 platforms had already been shut down, with the authority fielding more than 50 complaints per week about services still running. By mid-April, that figure had crossed 10,000. Then came the FIFA World Cup, and the number accelerated sharply. By 24 July 2026, the Prime Minister’s Secretariat confirmed the NTA had blocked 223,568 betting apps and websites since the World Cup began, with ISP representatives stationed directly at NTA headquarters to accelerate real-time blocking.

The September round targeting 200-plus brands is not a fresh start. It is the latest chapter in a crackdown that has been running continuously for five months.

Operators That Built a Real Market Inside a Country Where Betting Is Illegal

What makes Nepal’s situation genuinely unusual is how commercially established offshore platforms had become, despite the legal prohibition. Brands including those now blocked had offered cricket and football betting, live wagering, casino games and virtual sports, accepting deposits through digital payment services and international cards. Users did not have to search hard; these platforms were actively promoted to them.

Despite the Advertising Regulation Act of 2066 prohibiting gambling advertising, offshore companies were able to get around this act by engaging in advertising activities through influencers and online advertising channels that are not under the jurisdiction of Nepal. As pointed out by cybersecurity experts in the government reports, social media was the major conduit through which such brands targeted the young Nepali audience. Blocking the website does not kill the influencer’s page.

Penalties under the existing Criminal Code include asset confiscation, fines of up to NPR 10,000 (around $65) and imprisonment of up to one year. The government has extended warnings to VPN users attempting to reach blocked sites, though enforcement of that warning against individual users remains untested in practice.

The Mechanics of a Crackdown That Cannot Work Manually

NTA Assistant Director Om Prakash Mahato, who leads the dedicated enforcement task force, was direct about the scale of the problem. Mahato explained that manually identifying thousands of new domains is not realistic, so the authority relies on lists from authorised agencies and a Threat Intelligence Tool to detect newly created platforms before they can build audiences. His acknowledgement: shutting down one website is almost always followed by another appearing under a different domain name.

This dynamic will be familiar to regulators in Indonesia, which carried out aggressive platform blocks and bank account freezes between 2024 and 2025, only to find operators rotating through mirror sites and alternative domains at pace. India passed the Promotion and Regulation of Online Gaming Act in August 2025, prohibiting real-money wagering and placing payment processors under direct regulatory pressure. Nepal’s enforcement follows the same regional direction, arriving later but moving faster.

Lawmakers are pushing for structural change on a separate track. As of 21 July 2026, 58 members of Nepal’s House of Representatives submitted amendments to the Tourism Bill 2081, proposing an independent Casino Regulatory Unit under the Ministry of Culture, Tourism and Civil Aviation, mandatory KYC systems and real-time monitoring by Nepal’s Financial Intelligence Unit. Speaker Dol Prasad Aryal accepted those amendments for committee review. Those proposals cover land-based casino regulation; the online enforcement gap they do not yet address directly is the gap operators are currently living inside.

The Crackdown Has Now Turned Towards the Promotion Networks

Blocking a domain removes the storefront. It does not remove the team that drove customers to it. Nepal’s government has made this distinction explicit, with the NTA now instructed to monitor online activity tied to illegal betting and pursue individuals or networks helping platforms reach Nepali users, including through social media and digital advertising.

Dipa Dahal, Press and Research Expert to Prime Minister Balendra Shah, confirmed the crackdown falls within the broader governance reform agenda and that authorities continue monitoring and blocking reappearing platforms in real time. The gap that remains is jurisdictional: offshore operators and their promotional partners sit outside Nepal’s legal reach, which limits domestic enforcement tools to ISP-level access blocks and pursuing locally based affiliates.

User protection issues sharpen this problem further. Because the platforms that served Nepal were based abroad, Nepali authorities cannot resolve complaints about frozen accounts, suspected fraud or unpaid winnings. Those cases are documented; there is no formal resolution path under current law.

Expert Analysis: 223,568 Is Not the Success Metric – It Is the Problem Metric

We think the way Nepal’s crackdown is being reported is missing something important. Every headline celebrates the rising block count as evidence of enforcement strength. Our reading is the opposite: 223,568 blocked platforms is evidence of how many operators have decided Nepal is still worth pursuing despite the crackdown. Each new entry on the blocklist is an operator that weighed the enforcement risk and ran the domain anyway.

ISP-level domain blocking has a ceiling, and the NTA already knows it. The Threat Intelligence Tool, the dedicated task force, the ISP staff stationed on-site during the World Cup: all of it points to an authority working hard against a problem that outpaces its tools. VPN adoption rises predictably after bans of this kind, as Nepal itself saw during its social media restrictions in September 2025. Operators will keep rotating domains. The influencer pipelines that created commercial demand have not been touched in any structural way.

The parliamentary proposals for a Casino Regulatory Unit and AML monitoring point in the right direction, but they remain confined to land-based venues. Until Nepal builds enforcement that makes serving its online market commercially unviable for offshore operators, not just technically inconvenient, the blocklist will keep growing. At 223,568 and rising, that number is no longer a measure of how much has been done. It is a measure of how much keeps coming back.