FairPlay Referral Code

FairPlay operates in India without a licence, and passing on its referral code is itself a regulated act under India's 2025 online gaming law.

FairPlay holds no Indian licence. It has operated into India since around 2019 under a Curaçao licence — a licence issued by a jurisdiction with no authority in India and no consumer remedy available to an Indian customer. Where you would ordinarily ask "who do I complain to", the honest answer here is: nobody with jurisdiction over the operator.

The operators are being prosecuted. The Enforcement Directorate opened an investigation after a complaint from Viacom18, which alleged that FairPlay caused losses of over ₹100 crore by illegally streaming Indian Premier League matches. The investigation has since gone considerably wider than piracy. The ED has:

searched 19 locations across Mumbai and Pune;
attached assets of over ₹219 crore in November 2024 — demat holdings, land, flats and commercial warehouses across Rajasthan, Gujarat, Daman and Mumbai — with around ₹307 crore reported by September 2025;
alleged that proceeds of crime exceeding ₹4,000 crore were sent abroad under the guise of bogus imports;
filed a chargesheet under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act naming Krish Laxmichand Shah, Chirag Shah and Chintan Shah. Chirag and Chintan Shah were arrested in February 2025; Krish Shah is reported to be operating from Dubai and has not been arrested.

These are allegations, tested at trial and not yet proved. That distinction matters and we hold it deliberately. What is not in dispute is that the operation is unlicensed in India, that its domains have been blocked, and that its principals are facing criminal proceedings.

The site is blocked, and the blocks are routinely evaded. MeitY has blocked FairPlay's main domain among others; 1,410 gaming sites were blocked under the IT Rules by March 2025 following reports from the Indian Cybercrime Coordination Centre, and 1,524 blocking orders were issued against betting and gambling platforms between 2022 and June 2025. Offshore operators respond by cycling through near-identical mirror domains. A brand you can only reach through a rotating series of lookalike domains is telling you something about its permanence, and about what happens to a balance held with it.

Now the referral structure itself, which is the part that generalises. FairPlay's scheme paid the referrer a percentage of the amount a referred person deposits. Read that again as an incentive. Our Delta Exchange, ZuluTrade and CoinDCX pages name conflicts of interest where a referrer is paid more when the referred person does something that may not be in their interest. This is the purest example of the structure we have found. You are not paid when your friend enjoys themselves, or wins, or stops. You are paid in proportion to how much money they put in — and in a betting product, over time, money put in is money lost. The scheme pays you a commission on a friend's losses.

And the sharing itself is regulated. India's Promotion and Regulation of Online Gaming Act, 2025 — passed by Parliament on 21 August 2025, with Presidential assent on 22 August 2025 — creates separate offences for offering an online money game (s.5), advertising one (s.6) and facilitating payments for one (s.7). The advertising penalty under s.9(2) is up to two years' imprisonment, or a fine of up to ₹50 lakh, or both, rising for repeat offences. The Rules, 2026 were notified on 22 April 2026 and came into force on 1 May 2026, creating the Online Gaming Authority of India.

s.6 does not require you to run a betting platform. It is about advertising one. The ED's own chargesheet describes celebrity endorsement and digital advertising as the mechanism by which the operation was made to look legitimate, and Maharashtra Cyber questioned a well-known musician for over two hours about endorsing the app after it screened IPL 2023 matches. The Advertising Standards Council of India flagged 4,575 offshore and illegal betting advertisements in a single reporting period, escalated to the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, I4C and the DGGI.

So the practical advice, which is the only thing on this page worth acting on: a referral code is an advertisement with your name attached to it. Whatever a share of a friend's deposits might have been worth, it is not worth being the identifiable promoter of an unlicensed offshore betting operation to a regulator that has shown it will pursue promoters.