India built UPI for the economy. Gamblers built an economy on UPI

**Snigdha Sharma** (0:01)
Every IPL season, something interesting happens in living rooms across India. People who have never played cricket in their lives start arguing about how the game will end. This prediction, the one that our friends make with total confidence about the final score, can now be worth real money through UPI. The same UPI that we use to pay for groceries or split our dinner bills.
Betting in India is at least a $20 billion industry. And it has always been illegal, but it has also always existed. Whether it was in the mills of Bombay in the 1960s, or on offshore platforms based in Cyprus and Kurosawa.
Every time the government tries to close it down, it finds a new way and takes a new shape. What my colleague Mrunmayee Kulkarni, a reporter at The Ken, discovered is the latest new shape is almost invisible. In this version, there are no mule accounts for the Enforcement Directorate or ED2Freeze, and no suspicious transaction patterns for AI2Flag. And interestingly, there are also no victims who will file a complaint. It's just one Indian paying another Indian through infrastructure that the government itself built for a bet that they both agreed to place. So, I asked her to walk me through it, how she got in and how the money actually moves. Here she is, starting with an IPL night that made her go undercover as a willing gambler online for this story.

**Mrunmayee Kulkarni** (1:38)
I watched the IPL season with a bunch of my friends, all of whom are RCB fans, by the way, very hardcore. And it was a very typical math scene where they were sitting on the couch wearing their little IPL jerseys, yelling instructions at the players who were playing on the screen in their IPL jerseys. And they were saying things like, just play singles or this is not the time to be hitting boundaries, or you could get out. And one of my friends, he made a prediction. He said this would be the final score.
And I said, are you guessing? And he's like, no, no, I'm not guessing. This is a prediction. I watch enough matches that I know exactly what I'm talking about.
The other guys, they contradicted him, and they said, you know, it's not going to be 265 Maybe it'll be 250 Maybe it'll be 240 And the first guy, the final score actually came within like five runs of what he had predicted.

**Snigdha Sharma** (2:31)
Wow.

**Mrunmayee Kulkarni** (2:32)
Okay. And that's sort of when I realized that, it's not really a realization per se, but we do have a tendency, I think I've written this in the article, we do have a tendency as millennials but if we have a skill of any sort, we tend to monetize it.
We call it the hustle.

**Snigdha Sharma** (2:50)
Welcome to Daybreak, a business podcast from The Ken. I'm your host, Snigdha Sharma, and I don't chase the new cycle. Instead, every day of the week, my colleague Rachel Varghese and I will come to you with one business story that's worth understanding and worth your time. Today is Friday, the 19th of June.
That hustle instinct that Mrunmayee mentioned earlier is exactly what these platforms are built on. Getting onto one door requires something that the internet alone cannot give you. She describes the access model in a way that will make sense to anybody who has watched a conspiracy thriller.

**Mrunmayee Kulkarni** (3:43)
Think of it the way you would think of maybe the Illuminati, the super fictional organization, sure, that exists.

**Snigdha Sharma** (3:51)
The conspiracy theory.

**Mrunmayee Kulkarni** (3:52)
The conspiracy theory. So you know about the organization, but to get inside it, somebody has to vouch for you, right?

**Snigdha Sharma** (3:58)
Yeah.

**Mrunmayee Kulkarni** (3:59)
Yeah. So this is sort of similar. Like if you were to Google the platforms that I've mentioned in the article, you can probably find them anywhere and you can find maybe telegram channels linking you to them. But if you want to join them, somebody has to give you a WhatsApp number, you have to reach out to that person, and they would get you into the platform.
I think they kind of do it to make sure that the journalists don't get in like us, but yeah. I texted the person and he kind of gave me a very scripted ad spiel, like this is a platform, this is what you work on, these are the risks, told me not to gamble too much money, like a concerned dad would probably, and I got into the platform. I had a login ID and everything.

**Snigdha Sharma** (4:42)
A concerned dad running an illegal betting platform?