The Enforcement Directorate (ED) has called former Indian cricketer Suresh Raina to its headquarters in Delhi to answer questions on an investigation into illegal betting sites that is still going on. Late on Tuesday night, officials told HT about the development, but they didn’t have any more information on the particular questions that were asked.
The ED’s investigation is wide-ranging, including several locations and focusing on internet sites that are said to be deceiving users and laundering money. This is only one of many things the agency has done. On Monday, actor Rana Daggubati went to the ED in Hyderabad for a case that was related. The agency also sent summons to three other actors in July: Prakash Raj, Vijay Deverakonda, and Lakshmi Manchu.
The ED has also been talking to a lot of other people, such Google and Meta officials and media companies that may have being paid by these platforms for surrogate ads. Officials from the agency have said before that illegal betting sites have continued to function even though they are outlawed. They do this by changing their names and are often supported by celebrities and social media influencers.
An ED officer said that some 220 million people in India use different betting applications, and 110 million of them do so on a regular basis. The official further said that in the first three months of 2025, more than 1.6 billion visits were made to unlawful betting websites or applications. The internet betting sector in India might be worth about $100 million. People also think that the best betting applications are avoiding paying over ₹27,000 crore in taxes every year.
On Tuesday, an ED team searched 15 places in Mumbai, Delhi-NCR, Hyderabad, Jaipur, Madurai, and Surat as part of an investigation into a betting app named “Parimatch.” The probe, which began under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA), has found that more than ₹2,000 crore was taken from consumers who were tricked and then laundered using different methods, such as crypto wallets, minor cash withdrawals, and low-value UPI transactions.