How Unemployed Tech-Savvy Youth Ran The Infamous Mahadev Betting App

The Mahadev app, which provides a platform for illegal betting in poker, card games and cricket, badminton etc, has been creating news ever since names like Ranbir Kapoor and Kapil Sharma began to be linked with it.

The Mahadev betting app’s story started in 2017, but the police FIRs were registered only in late 2021. And while several prominent people have been named in FIRs , it was mostly young, unemployed people of Chattisgarh who were working for the app.

A 26-year old resident of Khursipar told Decode, “I won a little money in the beginning, and then I kept losing. So, I started working for them as an agent, to get more customers.”

According to Chhattisgarh police, they unearthed the Mahadev betting app case by a chance encounter, when they arrested four people from a hotel in Raipur who claimed that amongst the many ways they were betting, there was a new app called Mahadev App.

By November 2022, Chhattisgarh police had arrested over 250 people, booking more than 400 all related to the betting app.

Drawn by the volume of money-flow and the extravagant parties, replete with bollywood stars, the Enforcement Directorate too started investigating the Mahadev app in December 2022.