FairPlay casino is the casino side of an offshore betting exchange that won a big following among Indian cricket fans. On 11 November 2026 its long-time address, fairplay.club, still returned a Cloudflare 522 error, as it has since February 2025, while a site carrying the FairPlay logo was running at fairplay.global. Offering either to Indian users is illegal: online money games have been banned across India since 1 May 2026. We are an independent guide, so what follows is what we could check ourselves and where the gaps are.
What is FairPlay, and which site is the real one?
FairPlay made its name as an exchange. Instead of taking bets against a bookmaker, you back or lay an outcome and someone else takes the other side. Casino tables, slots and Indian card games sat next to the cricket markets.
The address history is messy, and it matters: a wrong address is the easiest way to type your password into a copy.
- fairplay.club was the main domain for years. Every Wayback Machine capture since 11 February 2025 shows error 522, meaning Cloudflare can’t reach the server behind it. We got the same error on 11 November 2026, both through an Indian home connection and from outside India.
- fairplay.live kept working into mid-2025. By 7 August 2025 archived records show it redirecting to fairplay.global, and today the name doesn’t resolve at all.
- fairplay.global loads, including from India. Its pages carry a
noindextag, which asks Google not to list it. A meta tag in the page code describes it as “India’s First Legal and Fastest Sports exchange and Casino Platform”. It isn’t legal, and the terms page doesn’t even name a company.
We can’t tell you whether the people behind fairplay.global are the ones who ran fairplay.club. Nothing on the site says who operates it. As for the numbered names that fill search suggestions (FairPlay 24, FairPlay Pro, FairPlay 111, FairPlay 777, “my fairplay”), fairplay.global doesn’t mention any of them, and we found nothing tying them to one company. Treat each one as a separate, unknown site.
Is FairPlay casino legal in India after 1 May 2026?
No. The law is PROGA, short for Promotion and Regulation of Online Gaming Act, No. 32 of 2025. Parliament passed it on 21 August 2025. The government notified it on 22 April 2026, and it has applied since 1 May 2026. It bans online money games outright, whether they run on chance, skill or both, so exchanges, casino lobbies, rummy for cash and paid fantasy contests are all caught.
The government’s own PIB explainer lists the maximum penalties:
| Who is targeted | Max jail | Max fine |
|---|---|---|
| Anyone offering or facilitating a money game | 3 years | ₹1 crore |
| Banks and payment firms handling the money | 3 years | ₹1 crore |
| Advertisers and promoters | 2 years | ₹50 lakh |
| Repeat offenders | 5 years | ₹2 crore |
The key offences are cognisable and non-bailable, so police can arrest without a warrant. Sites can also be blocked under the IT Act, 2000; PIB counts 1,524 betting and gambling sites and apps blocked between 2022 and June 2025. A new regulator, the Online Gaming Authority of India, was set up when the Act took effect.
What about you as a player? Ashwini Vaishnaw, the electronics and IT minister, described players as victims during the debate and said they would not be punished; the penalty sections name operators, promoters and payment firms. The flip side is that nobody official will help you get money back from an operator that is breaking the law. States were already moving the same way: Telangana (2017) and Andhra Pradesh (2020) wrote online betting bans into their gaming laws years before the central Act.
What did the ED and the IPL streaming case involve?
It began with cricket rights, not betting. On 20 April 2023 Viacom18, which held the IPL digital rights, filed an FIR with Maharashtra’s nodal cyber police accusing the FairPlay app of streaming IPL 2023 matches without permission and claiming a loss of more than ₹100 crore. Several film and music celebrities who had promoted the app were called in as witnesses later that year.
The Enforcement Directorate built a money-laundering case on that FIR. According to its September 2025 statement, it searched premises four times between June and October 2024, arrested two people on 12 February 2025, filed a prosecution complaint on 1 April 2025 and, that September, attached ₹307.16 crore in bank balances and Dubai property. That took its attachments and seizures to about ₹651.31 crore. It named companies in Curaçao, Dubai and Malta. Earlier, in April 2025, the ED alleged that player deposits were collected through dummy and mule bank accounts and that over ₹4,000 crore went abroad dressed up as import and export deals and investments that never happened.
Then it got complicated. The Bombay High Court quashed the Viacom18 FIR on 12 February 2025 after the two sides settled. In September 2026 the PMLA Appellate Tribunal allowed 53 appeals and set aside the orders confirming the attachments and account freezes, because they rested only on that quashed FIR (LiveLaw report). The tribunal noted that later FIRs about betting could support fresh action. We found no report that the wider case has been closed.
What can you do on fairplay.global today?
From the front page alone: exchange markets on 15 sports, led by cricket, plus politics, “binary” markets and something called PrediX. There is a separate sportsbook tab, a casino lobby with live dealer tables, Indian card games and slots, and a fantasy section. Almost everything beyond the front page sends you to a login screen. Our betting guide explains how the exchange odds work, and the casino games page lists what the lobby showed.
Accounts run on a username and password, with a +91 phone or WhatsApp number confirmed by OTP at sign-up. Help is a WhatsApp button, covered on our login page. The cashier stays hidden until you log in; our deposits and withdrawals page sets out what is known and what the ED alleged about where money went.
Is FairPlay safe or a scam? Our verdict
We can’t prove it is a scam, and we don’t deposit money on sites we review. What we can do is count warning signs, and here they pile up: no named operator, a template terms page with blanks left in, an Android file built under a com.example placeholder name and served from someone else’s domain, a dead flagship domain, and a money-laundering case that described deposits flowing through rotating shell accounts. Add a national law that leaves you with no regulator to turn to.
For a reader in India the verdict is simple. Don’t sign up and don’t deposit. If you are somewhere betting is legal and you still want an exchange or a casino, pick one whose licence number checks out on the regulator’s public register.
Whatever sits behind that link is run by somebody else, quite possibly not FairPlay, and it stays off-limits for anyone in India.
Sources we used, besides our own checks of the sites on 11 November 2026: the PIB explainer on the Act, SCC Online on its commencement, BOOM on the IPL streaming case, the ED figures reported by ANI and the Free Press Journal, and the LiveLaw tribunal report.
What holds up
- Back and lay odds, with the money matched at each price, are visible on the front page without an account
- Deep cricket coverage: Test matches, ODIs and the Women's Big Bash were all open on the day we looked
- The lobby lists live-dealer studios such as Evolution and Ezugi beside Teen Patti and Andar Bahar
What doesn't
- No operator name, licence number or regulator anywhere on fairplay.global
- Offering it in India has been a crime since 1 May 2026, so there is nobody official to complain to
- The Android app is a 2.5 MB file with a placeholder package name, hosted on an unrelated domain
- The ED alleges user deposits ran through short-lived dummy accounts of shell companies