The home minister, Salahuddin Ahmed, made this disclosure while addressing a gathering comprising of members of the Bangladesh Secretariat Reporters Forum in Dhaka.
The 1867 act was written for a different world entirely. British colonial administrators designed it to shut down gambling houses and punish participants caught on the premises.
It says nothing about the internet. That silence created a legal grey area that operators have exploited aggressively. A government report last year estimated that five million Bangladeshis were active on online gambling sites.
The CID, the criminal investigation arm of Bangladesh Police, found more than 1,000 mobile financial service agents allegedly processing illegal gambling transactions and referred them to Bangladesh Bank for licence cancellations.
Platforms are hosted abroad, where users can access them through VPN connections that render local enforcement largely ineffective.
Bangladesh is not without more recent tools. The Cyber Security Ordinance of 2025 made operating or promoting an online gambling platform a criminal offence, carrying up to two years in prison or a fine of one crore taka, equivalent to around $85,000.
The CID launched its first major enforcement campaign under that ordinance last July, eventually identifying more than 5,000 financial accounts linked to illegal betting.
Bangladesh Bank was instructed to deploy transaction-monitoring software to catch suspicious activity in real time.
Ongoing efforts falling short
Ahmed told parliament in April there was “no alternative” to a coordinated nationwide crackdown and promised enforcement would begin after the parliamentary session ended on 30 April.
He has described online gambling as a top-two priority for the home ministry, alongside drugs, insisting too little has been done to combat the issue to date.
The social effects of online gambling have increased the sense of urgency among government officials. CID representatives say the gambling networks are no longer just a Dhaka phenomenon.
Instead, they have migrated into rural areas, with users losing savings, homes and livelihoods. Bangladesh Bank has separately flagged cross-border money laundering through betting platforms as a systemic financial risk.
The country’s GDP growth has meanwhile slipped to between 3.7% and 4%, well below the 6%-7% it averaged in previous years. This adds economic weight to the government’s concern about capital bleeding into illicit channels.
In April, the High Court ordered a seven-member committee formed to investigate celebrity endorsements of gambling platforms. Most saw this as a sign of how normalised the industry’s marketing had become.
The new legislation, when it reaches parliament, is designed to do several things the 1867 act cannot.
It will define online gambling explicitly, establish jurisdiction over foreign-hosted platforms, and create penalties proportionate to the scale of the digital problem.
The minister gave no date for the next parliamentary session beyond describing the bill as near completion.
The bill, he said, will go before parliament in its next session.
Dingnews.com 27/05/2026