Africa's Offshore Reckoning: South Africa and Egypt Both Turn on Illegal Gambling at Once

Two of Africa's biggest economies moved against offshore and illegal online gambling in the same week, and the figures behind the pushback explain the urgency. South Africa's National Gambling Board told a parliamentary committee it has asked the state to help block foreign casino sites, while Egypt is drafting amendments to its Cybercrime Law that would make running an online betting operation punishable by up to life imprisonment. The targets differ, but the pattern is the same: regulated revenue is climbing, the unlicensed market is climbing faster, and the operators draining it sit in jurisdictions like Curacao, Malta, Gibraltar and the Philippines.

South Africa's case rests on a gap that has widened with the legal market. Gross gambling revenue rose more than 26% to R75bn ($4.3bn) in the 2024/25 financial year, on turnover of roughly R1.5trn, with betting accounting for about 70% of the total. Online betting GGR alone grew about 60% year over year. The state collected R5.8bn ($335m) in taxes and levies, betting supplying 59% of that. Against those numbers, the NGB told Parliament's portfolio committee that more than R50bn a year, close to two thirds of the legal market's size, is being siphoned by illegal offshore operators, and that an estimated 16 million South Africans engaged with unlicensed platforms over the past year.

NGB chief executive Lungelo Dukwana framed the problem as a cross-border one the regulator cannot solve alone. "We are seeing that there are external operators in our space, and those are not licensed in South Africa, and that creates a challenge of its own because, in that specific instance, they are coming from the online casinos, and they are offered by other countries," he told the committee, as reported by BusinessDay. The board has asked the Department of Communications and Digital Technologies to help block access to the sites, has contacted regulators in the host jurisdictions, and has issued legal notices to companies it believes are operating unlawfully inside the country. Prosecution stays hard because a blocked site reappears under a new address within days.

The South African twist is that online casino play is simply illegal there, which is what hands the offshore market its opening. Courts have repeatedly held that interactive casino gaming is prohibited under the National Gambling Act, while sports betting through a licensed bookmaker is allowed. The Democratic Alliance's Remote Gambling Bill, a private member's bill drafted to regulate online casino play, has sat with the Trade, Industry and Competition committee without a hearing. The licensed casinos that already operate inside the law are under their own pressure, facing South African anti-money-laundering filing deadlines with steep penalties for non-compliance. Until that changes, every South African who wants to spin a slot online has nowhere licensed to do it, and the demand flows straight to operators in Curacao and Malta that the NGB now wants taken offline.

Egypt drafts the harder line

Egypt is the larger prize and the blunter response. Data Bridge put the country's sports betting revenue at $1.5bn in 2024, projected to reach $2.9bn by 2032, and almost all of it runs through a grey market: land-based betting and casinos are banned in the predominantly Muslim country, and the absence of any law specifically naming online betting left a loophole that web platforms exploited. The government is closing it. Ahmed Badawy, chair of the House Communications and Information Technology Committee, has detailed amendments to the Cybercrime Law that would explicitly criminalize online gambling, building on a January 2025 bill from MP Martha Mahrous. Egypt's draft penalties reach life imprisonment for the most serious cases, with multi-year terms for local agents and criminal liability for payment processors that move the money.

Enforcement is already running ahead of the statute. Badawy said in February 2026 that the National Telecommunications Regulatory Authority and the Supreme Council for Media Regulation were working to block roughly 80% of online betting apps, and Russian-licensed 1xBet, which had pushed hard through influencers, was pulled from Google Play and the App Store back in September 2024. As of late June 2026, Parliament had not scheduled a vote, so the life-imprisonment clause remains a draft rather than law.

Why the industry should watch the East African precedent

For operators and affiliates, the warning is that blocking and criminalizing rarely kill demand, they relocate it, and the bill usually lands on the treasury. Kenya is the case study. After it doubled the betting stake tax to 20% in 2019, SportPesa and Betin halted operations, an estimated 2,500 jobs went with them, and more than a fifth of SportPesa's Kenyan turnover had been flowing offshore even before the exit. By 2020 the parliamentary finance committee conceded the higher rate had produced lower revenue, and the stake tax was cut to 7.5%. The lesson generalizes across the region, where punitive policy has repeatedly pushed players to the very offshore sites regulators were trying to suppress, a pattern visible from Tanzania's stacked betting levies to Kenya's own reversals.

That history sets up the affiliate calculation. South Africa's blocking push raises the cost of sending traffic to unlicensed casino brands, and Egypt's draft attaches personal criminal liability to anyone acting as a local agent, which in practice covers the affiliate and payment layer, not only the operator. Licensed sports betting in South Africa stays open and is growing at 60% a year, so the regulated opportunity is real for affiliates willing to stay inside it. The unregulated casino traffic that has powered much of the grey market now carries blocking risk in Johannesburg and prison risk in Cairo. The same Big Tech distribution chokepoint that UK regulators are leaning on over black-market ads is the one Egypt is already squeezing through the app stores.

What is next is procedural and slow on both fronts. South Africa needs the communications department to act on the blocking request and Parliament to move the Remote Gambling Bill, neither of which has a date. Egypt needs its amendments tabled and passed, and nothing was on the agenda by the end of June. The intent is now on the record in both capitals, backed by an R50bn hole in Pretoria and a life-imprisonment clause in Cairo.