DGGI wants every payment to carry the website that asked for the money

The Directorate General of GST Intelligence has asked the government to make payment companies record the website that sent a customer to the pay button. The proposal, reported on 2 and 3 September, is meant to close a hole that illegal betting platforms have used since real-money online games were banned.

DGGI's own casework put the detected betting rail at about Rs 70,000 crore in a single financial year. Investigators say the money moved through roughly 750 shell merchants dressed up as IT or travel firms. The estimated GST evasion on that flow is Rs 19,600 crore. Four senior executives tied to fintech, banking and verification vendors have been arrested in the wider probe. Others are listed as absconding.

How the rail worked

Operators stood up sites such as funinmatch365.com and racejeet247.com. Shell companies obtained merchant accounts with payment aggregators. Players paid by UPI and other digital rails. The money then passed through a chain of accounts, mule holders and "business" payouts that looked clean on a bank statement. The missing field, in the agency's telling, was the originating URL. A UPI collect request that only shows a merchant name does not tell a bank that the customer clicked pay on a betting page.

The new ask is that every payment instruction carry the website, and that every GST-registered site list every bank account tied to that registration. The second list is how DGGI wants to see layering: one legal name, many accounts, money hopping between them.

ED's parallel file

On 2 September the Enforcement Directorate searched 12 premises in Maharashtra, Delhi-NCR, Rajasthan and Gujarat in a money-laundering case around the Cyprus-based platform Parimatch. The ED says the platform and its associates booked more than Rs 3,000 crore in a year. The searches targeted payment firms accused of turning betting proceeds into cash through Cash Management System agents. The seed FIR came from Mumbai cyber police.

The two agencies are not running one case. They are looking at the same plumbing. UPI still clears the deposits. Merchant onboarding still happens at aggregators. CMS and business-correspondent channels still turn digital balances into cash. A URL field on the payment message would give GST officers and the ED a join key that bank statements do not currently offer.

What consultation will decide

DGGI says banks and payment firms will be consulted before any mandate is written. That consultation is where the proposal can shrink. Aggregators will argue about latency, privacy and the cost of storing URLs. The agency will argue that without the field the ban on online money games is a website-blocking exercise that the next domain name defeats.

Until the rule exists, the operational fact is the one DGGI already published: Rs 70,000 crore moved through merchants that were not bookmakers on paper. The next useful number will be how many of those accounts payment companies freeze once the URL field, if it comes, lights them up.