Egypt Moves to Criminalize Online Betting, With Life Sentences on the Table

Egypt's parliament is preparing amendments to the Cybercrime Law that would explicitly criminalize online betting applications, and senior lawmakers say the toughest cases could carry life imprisonment. Ahmed Badawi, chair of the House Communications and Information Technology Committee, said in May 2026 that the government would submit its own draft after Eid al-Adha. By late June no text had appeared on the parliamentary agenda, so the measure remains a stated intention rather than a passed law.

The move would close a gap that has existed for years. Egypt already bans gambling for its own citizens, but the rules were written for physical venues. Under the Civil Code, gambling contracts are void; the Penal Code criminalizes gambling activity; and hotel-casino legislation carves out a narrow exception for foreign passport holders inside licensed venues. None of those texts names online betting directly. That silence let Arabic-language sportsbooks run on foreign licenses while Egyptians reached them through VPNs and offshore payment channels, the same pattern of black-market access that has drawn pressure on big tech in other markets and fueled an illegal betting surge around major tournaments elsewhere.

The scale is not small. iGamingToday estimates Egyptian-facing operators generate roughly $125 million in monthly gross gaming revenue, about $1.5 billion annualized, split close to evenly between sports betting near $65 million and online casino near $60 million. That is the revenue base parliament now wants to push fully into illegality.

What the bill would actually punish

The clearest picture of penalties comes from a separate bill that MP Martha Mahrous tabled in January 2025. Badawi has since said the government will write its own amendments rather than adopt her text, but her structure is the working template, and it sets graduated penalties by role.

The life-imprisonment ceiling is the headline, and it attaches to organized criminal networks and large-scale fraud rather than to a casual bettor. Mahrous framed the problem in public-health terms in a television interview, saying, "We are facing a kind of addiction, and scientifically we treat the young person as addicted to these practices." Her draft, she argued, is needed because existing law deals with online betting only through a single inadequate Penal Code article. The government amendments are also expected to fold in wider digital offenses such as cyber extortion and online misinformation, so betting would sit inside a broader Cybercrime Law overhaul.

Enforcement did not wait for new statute. Egypt blocked Russian-licensed 1xBet on Google Play and the App Store in September 2024 after complaints routed through Badawi's committee, and in early 2026 Badawi said similar action was underway against MelBet. iGaming Business reported that authorities targeted roughly 80% of online betting apps for blocking in February 2026. Badawi has said blocked apps will not be allowed back, and that the new penalties are meant to close the loopholes that let them spread.

Why operators and affiliates should read this closely

If the government follows the Mahrous template even loosely, Egypt joins a short list of MENA markets that criminalize the supply chain around offshore betting, not only the bet itself. The precedent worth watching is Turkey, another Muslim-majority market that overhauled its penal code in late 2025. Turkey set four to six years in prison for providing internet access to foreign betting sites, three to five years for moving the money, and one to three years for promoting it, then froze the financial rails: officials identified more than one million payment and e-money accounts tied to illegal betting and shut down over 3,000 virtual POS systems used to collect stakes. The lesson from Ankara is that prison terms plus payment-rail seizure move the market faster than app-store blocks alone, which VPNs route around.

For operators, the exposure shifts from regulatory nuisance to personal criminal liability for anyone running an Egypt-facing book, holding a local agent role, or processing deposits. For affiliates and influencers, the risk is direct. 1xBet's Egyptian growth ran on influencer and social promotion, exactly the activity Turkey now jails for one to three years and that Egypt's draft treats as sponsoring or implementing a platform. The same payment-rail logic surfacing in Ghana's crypto wallet crackdown and Armenia's online casino bans points to where Egypt is likely to go next: cut the deposit channels, then prosecute the people who built them.

What is concrete today: a committee chair on record, a tabled bill with named penalty tiers, an 80% app-blocking sweep already run, and a government draft promised after a holiday that fell in May 2026. The text itself had not reached the floor as of late June 2026.