What it costs to move illegal gambling money: Telegram fee quotes from Brazil, the Philippines, India and 16 other markets

• Median advertised pay-in fees: Brazil 1.4%, Philippines 2.25%, India 5.85%, from 84 merchant quotes in 11 public Telegram channels and groups.
• Quotes from the past six months point the same way: India 6.5% (7 quotes), Brazil 2.3% (3) and the Philippines 2.4% (1).
• The highest quotes come from South Asia and East Africa: Pakistan 6.4%, Tanzania 6%, India 5.85%, Uganda 5.75%, Bangladesh 5.2%, Kenya 5%.
• Sellers price in account freezes, player complaints to police, low success rates and bank controls.
• AskSpinner's index adds licensed operators and blocked domains per million people: Brazil blocks 314 domains per million, the Philippines 108 and India 6.
• Convenience does not equal prevalence: payment friction sets the cost of illegal gambling, not its scale.

An illegal gambling site cannot open an account with a bank or a licensed payment company. To take deposits, it hires an underground processor that collects players’ money through local payment apps and pays out winnings the same way. In Chinese-language markets this trade is called daishou daifu (“collect and pay on behalf”). Its sellers advertise openly on Telegram, and their price lists say a great deal about how each country polices its payment system.

AskSpinner read the public posts of 13 Telegram channels and groups that sell these services, in Chinese, English and Russian, and recorded 100 price quotes across 19 countries. Of these, 84 are prices charged to gambling merchants; the rest are rates offered to the people who supply the bank and wallet accounts. The quotes are advertising, not audited prices. But they are consistent enough to show a clear pattern.

The underground fee table

*Excludes a 2021 quote of 15%, made before betting was regulated. “Recent” means posted on or after 6 May 2026. Many sellers also charge 1%-4% to settle balances in stablecoins.

One cross-check removes differences between sellers. A single English- and Russian-language broker channel quoted most of these markets in 2026, and its prices follow the same order: Mexico from 0.7%, Vietnam 1.3%, Brazil 2.3%-3.5%, the Philippines 2.4%, Nigeria 3.2%-3.5%, Kenya 4.5%-5%, Bangladesh 5.5%-7.3% and India 5.7%-7.5%.

Pay-in is the share of each player deposit the processor keeps; payout is the charge for sending winnings to players. Samples are small for several countries, and recent quotes rely heavily on one broker channel (see Methods and limits below).

How the fees are set

The posts themselves explain most of the price. Four costs come up repeatedly.

• Channel risk and success rates. Sellers advertise how often a deposit actually goes through, and Indian offers in 2026 quote conversion rates of 40%-80%. Rates of 80% or more are usually reserved for “class one” money, meaning ordinary betting and card games. Higher-risk “class two” money, such as investment schemes, gets lower success rates and higher fees: one Indian group quoted 5% for betting merchants and 7% for fund schemes. Every failed deposit is lost revenue, so the real cost is higher than the headline fee.
• Account freezes and complaints. Underground processors collect money into personal or business accounts that banks shut when they spot gambling patterns. Sellers advertise channels that can “withstand complaints”, promise compensation for frozen funds or offer to handle police and court cases. They also warn that they will freeze a merchant’s entire balance if it routes riskier products through a channel sold for betting. A 2026 Indian post said UPI accounts were getting harder to obtain, payouts slower and freezes more frequent.
• Bank and central-bank controls. In September 2026 a Philippine processor told clients it would raise both deposit and withdrawal fees from 1 October because its local partner banks had raised their charges. It also said the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas had suspended a crypto exchange its clients used to convert pesos. In India, 2026 posts blamed delayed settlement and frozen funds on bank reviews.
• Enforcement. India’s Promotion and Regulation of Online Gaming Act 2025 bans online money gaming and restricts related financial transactions. A May 2026 post from an Indian channel linked the ban to the rise in collection fees.

Country by country, from cheapest to most expensive

Brazil: about 1.4%

Brazil’s Pix is run by the central bank, handled 79.8 billion transactions in 2025 and charges almost nothing to move money. That low cost carries over to the underground. A July 2026 post from a multi-country processor offered Pix collection at 0.2% plus 10 centavos, with payouts at 10 centavos each. Brokers selling to offshore operators charged more in August-October 2026, at 2.3%-3.5% with 1.5%-2% payouts, but still well below their prices for India.

The low price fits a market where illegal operators could hide among 188 licensed brands until fixed-odds betting was banned under Provisional Measure 1.394 on 25 September 2026. Brazil’s pressure on illegal betting has come through domain blocking rather than payments. An industry-commissioned study put the illegal share of online betting at about 41% in the first half of 2026. Whether the ban raises Pix processing prices is the next thing to watch. The only post-ban quote AskSpinner found, from 15 October 2026, repeated a 3.5% offer first posted in May.

Philippines: 2.25%

GCash and Maya collection is advertised at 1.3%-4.7%, with payouts usually free apart from a 5-20 peso transfer charge. Only two quotes are from 2026: 1.3% on 4 May and 2.4% on 6 May. Most others date from 2024, when sellers offered 1.8%-2.3% for wallet transfers and up to 4.7% for “native” GCash connections that are harder for wallets to detect. Sellers posting since then still advertise Philippine channels but rarely publish a price.

The middle-range price matches a market where illegal and licensed sites compete side by side. PAGCOR has 48 online licensees under a licensing freeze, and its chairman has said that about half of the gaming sites accessed in the country are illegal. The regulator’s response has focused on blocking sites. The October 2026 fee rise blamed on bank charges suggests pressure on wallet and bank channels is starting to show up in prices.

India: 5.85%

India is the most expensive of the three. Pay-in quotes run from 4% to 8%, with payouts of about 1.2%-4% plus a fixed charge of 6-7 rupees. The seven quotes from the past six months are higher still, at 5.3%-7.5% with a median of 6.5%, and several warn that only 40%-65% of deposit attempts go through. Even the rates processors offer to the people who supply UPI accounts, 4%-5.3% in 2026, are above what merchants pay in Brazil or the Philippines.

This is not because Indians find it hard to pay. UPI handled 228.3 billion transactions in 2025, or 157 per person, four times the per-person use of the Philippines’ InstaPay. The price reflects the risk of collecting gambling money in a country that has banned online money gaming, where banks freeze accounts and players file complaints with cybercrime police.

High fees have not shrunk demand. The policy group CUTS International estimates that Indians deposit about $100 billion a year with illegal offshore sites. A CUTS survey in the Delhi region found offshore use rose after the 2025 ban. AskSpinner has reported on a mule-account betting racket in Bhiwandi, one way processors find fresh accounts to replace frozen ones.

What the comparators add

Pakistan (6.4%) and Bangladesh (5.2%) sit alongside India at the top of the table. All three restrict online gambling, and bank and wallet accounts are frozen often. The cheapest markets, Brazil and Mexico, have licensed online betting and cheap instant payments run by their central banks.

East Africa shows that legal status is not the whole story. Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania and Ghana license betting, yet high-risk merchant quotes sit at 5%-6%. In Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania and Ghana the quotes are addressed to licensed operators, so they reflect high-risk processing costs on mobile money rather than black-market pricing. There the rail itself is expensive: mobile-money operators charge their own transaction fees, and sellers add settlement fees of 3%-4%. Kenya’s M-Pesa is as convenient as any payment system, but it is not cheap. Indonesia and Vietnam ban online gambling yet are quoted at about 2%. How strictly banks and wallets police accounts, and what the rail itself costs, matter as much as the law on paper.

The AskSpinner index

AskSpinner combined the fee data with two measures of the legal market and enforcement.

*Last list before the September 2026 ban.

Per 1,000 people, blocked domains are 0.31 in Brazil, 0.11 in the Philippines and 0.006 in India. The country-level index is available as a CSV download with a methodology README.

India has the most expensive underground payments and the fewest blocked sites per person. Brazil has the cheapest payments and blocks the most sites. Enforcement in Brazil has targeted websites; in India it has targeted the money.

Conclusion: convenience is not prevalence

The idea that easier payments produce more illegal gambling does not survive the data. India’s UPI is as convenient as any payment system in the world, yet it is among the most expensive places in the 19-country sample to move gambling money, and illegal gambling there remains very large. The Philippines has the weakest payment indicators of the three countries, yet illegal sites are thought to take around half of the market.

What payment friction does is set the price. When banks freeze accounts and regulators restrict gambling transactions, processors charge more and fewer deposits succeed. Operators absorb or pass on those costs, but players keep betting. The size of the illegal market depends more on whether a legal option exists, how many licences are available and how hard governments enforce. For more on how regulators are targeting payment rails, see AskSpinner’s payment-channel blocking tracker.

Methods and limits

• Telegram quotes: 100 quotes for 19 countries from 13 public Telegram channels and groups (12 publishers) that advertise deposit collection and payout for gambling merchants, in Chinese, English and Russian. They were read through Telegram’s public web previews on 6 November 2026; AskSpinner did not join any private group, contact any seller or use any service. Each quote is one rail in one post, and repeated posts of the same offer count once. Medians use the 84 prices charged to merchants; 15 rates offered to account suppliers and one 2021 Brazil outlier are excluded. Quotes older than six months are flagged in the dataset.
• Sample: India 14 merchant quotes (7 recent, from 3 channels), the Philippines 8 (1 recent) and Brazil 4 (3 recent, from 2 channels); most comparator countries have 1-6. Of 55 recent merchant quotes, 37 come from one broker channel. One aggregator channel supplied many of the 2024 rate cards. Chinese-language channels now rarely post prices.
• What the fees miss: advertised rates exclude success rates, deposits, minimum volumes, exchange spreads on conversion to stablecoins, and losses from frozen accounts.
• Other data: licensed operators from Brazil’s Ministry of Finance and PAGCOR; blocking counts from Brazil’s Secretariat of Prizes and Betting (released under a freedom-of-information request), PAGCOR and India’s IT ministry, over different time periods; payments from the Banco Central do Brasil, NPCI and the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (via BusinessWorld); adult digital-payment use from the World Bank’s Global Findex 2025; population from UN World Population Prospects 2024.
• Three countries cannot establish a statistical relationship.

Cover photo: Pedro França/Agência Senado, CC BY 2.0 (cropped; file photo). Original photograph; licence.

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