Egypt parliament moves to criminalise online betting
Egypt has long prohibited gambling for its own citizens, but its rules were written for physical venues, not for online betting.
The Civil Code voids gambling contracts, the Penal Code criminalises gambling activity and hotel-casino legislation allows only a narrow exception for foreign passport holders in licensed casinos.
Online gambling remains illegal for locals, but enforcement has lagged. Many Egyptians still use offshore sportsbooks through VPNs and foreign payment channels. Existing laws do not address online gambling directly, and that gap has been the focus of years of parliamentary complaints about Arabic-language platforms operating from foreign licences.
In May 2026, Ahmed Badawi, chair of the House Communications and Information Technology Committee, said the government is expected to submit amendments to the Cybercrime Law and that those amendments would explicitly criminalise online betting applications.
The proposed amendments will name electronic gambling explicitly and introduce much tougher penalties, with maximum sentences that, in the most serious cases involving organised criminal networks and large-scale fraud, could reach life imprisonment.
Blocking campaign
In February 2026, Badawi said the National Telecommunications Regulatory Authority and the Supreme Council for Media Regulation were working to block about 80% of online betting applications, based on technical reports prepared with his committee.
Russian-licensed 1xBet, which had promoted itself heavily in Egypt via influencers and social media, was blocked on Google Play and the App Store in September 2024 after a wave of complaints and recommendations from parliament’s communications committee. In early 2026, Badawi said similar action was being taken to shut down MelBet as part of a broader takedown campaign against online betting apps.
Badawi has repeatedly stressed that the aim is not to block technology in general but to shut down harmful services. In one interview, he said that blocked betting apps would not be allowed to return and that new legislation is being drafted with tougher penalties to close the loopholes that allowed them to spread in the first place.
How penalties could be structured
The clearest indication of how penalties might be calibrated comes from a separate initiative within the same committee. In January 2025, MP Martha Mahrous, its deputy chair, tabled her own bill to criminalise electronic betting. In a television interview, she said the spread of electronic betting had become extremely dangerous and argued that existing law does not explicitly deal with online betting, beyond a single Penal Code article on gambling that she considers inadequate.
“We are facing a kind of addiction, and scientifically we treat the young person as addicted to these practices,” she said.
Her draft, published by local media, sets out a three-tier structure: agents and de facto managers acting for bettors would face two to five years’ imprisonment and fines of EGP1 million ($20,099) to EGP5 million; payment facilitators up to six months’ imprisonment and fines between EGP50,000 and EGP200,000; and those running, sponsoring or implementing platforms two to five years’ imprisonment and fines from EGP5 million to EGP10 million.
Badawi has since confirmed that the government is preparing its own amendments rather than simply adopting the Mahrous text. The two instruments are not identical and Mahrous’ bill has not advanced to a full House debate, but together they signal that the committee is working on parallel tracks.
What happens next
Questions remain about how any eventual government text will deal with VPN access – which allows users to reach blocked sites – and address liability for payment intermediaries. The Mahrous draft assumes a knowledge-based standard for facilitators, but banks and electronic payment providers have not publicly explained how they would apply that in practice.
Early drafts also point to the possibility of fines for users who continue to access banned apps, but no official text spelling out user-side liability has yet been published.
The House journal has not yet set a specific schedule for tabling or voting on the government’s cybercrime amendments. Badawi had previously indicated that the text would be submitted to parliament after Eid al-Adha, the major Islamic holiday that fell in June, but as of late June, no draft has appeared on the agenda or been set for debate.
If the government follows Mahrous’s template, even loosely, Egypt would likely end up with one of the toughest online betting regimes in the region. Operators, local agents and payment facilitators could face multi-year prison terms and multi-million-pound fines on top of the existing blocking campaign.
Mahrous’ bill tops out at five-year jail terms, but Badawi’s outline for the executive amendments raises the prospect of life sentences for the worst digital gambling offences. For offshore sportsbooks and their partners, that would mark a shift from a loosely enforced prohibition to a system in which Egypt’s long-standing ban on gambling is backed by a dedicated digital enforcement tool aimed squarely at online betting and the financial channels that support it.