Egypt's House of Representatives is preparing amendments to the Cybercrime Law that would, for the first time, name electronic gambling explicitly as a crime — with penalties in the most serious cases, involving organized networks and large-scale fraud, reaching life imprisonment. Ahmed Badawi, chair of the House Communications and Information Technology Committee, confirmed in May 2026 that the government would submit the text after Eid al-Adha. As of late June, it still had not appeared on the parliamentary agenda (iGaming Business).
The policy problem the amendments are meant to solve is real. Badawi has said roughly 17 million Egyptians use betting applications, and has publicized individual cases of severe harm — including a 16-year-old who reportedly lost 350,000 Egyptian pounds gambling on one app (Elbalad). The Communications Committee has already pushed Google Play and the App Store to remove 1xBet (September 2024) and MelBet (early 2026), and the National Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (NTRA), working with the Supreme Council for Media Regulation, has targeted roughly 80% of online betting applications for blocking as of February 2026 (iGaming Business). A separate bill tabled by MP Martha Mahrous in January 2025 sketches a three-tier liability structure: agents and managers facing 2-5 years and fines of EGP 1-5 million, payment facilitators up to six months and EGP 50,000-200,000, and platform operators 2-5 years and fines up to EGP 10 million.
The steelman: this is a genuine harm-reduction problem
Problem gambling among young Egyptians accessing offshore books through informal channels is not a moral panic. Unlicensed operators offer no responsible-gambling tools, no dispute resolution, and no tax revenue for the state, while extracting money from a population with limited financial cushion. Treating this the way most jurisdictions treat unlicensed gambling — blocking, seizing payment rails, prosecuting organized operators — is a legitimate regulatory response, and the scale Badawi cites (millions of users, life-altering individual losses) is the kind of evidence base proportionate regulation is supposed to require.
Where the law runs out of road
The amendments' silence on VPNs isn't a drafting gap so much as an admission that the existing toolkit doesn't work. Egypt already has a VPN-circumvention offense on the books: Article 14 of Law No. 175 of 2018 (the Anti-Cyber and Information Technology Crimes Law) criminalizes using tools — including VPNs — to access blocked content, carrying at least one year in prison and fines of EGP 50,000-100,000, rising to two years and EGP 100,000-200,000 if data is altered or copied in the process (Al-Masry Al-Youm). That statute is the actual official text lodged with WIPO's international treaty database (WIPO Lex). In other words: the enforcement mechanism lawmakers are now searching for already exists, on paper, for exactly this scenario. What's missing isn't legal authority — it's a credible way to apply it to millions of individual bettors without turning ordinary VPN users into new felons.
That distinction matters because VPNs in Egypt are not a niche gambling-evasion tool. Freedom House's Freedom on the Net project has documented at least 600 websites blocked since May 2017, including 394 VPN and proxy providers themselves, alongside 116 news sites (Freedom House). Millions of Egyptians run VPNs for entirely mundane reasons: reaching blocked independent news sites, using workplace tools, or simply routing around whatever the state has blocked that week. A betting-focused amendment that either explicitly extends Article 14 penalties to gambling-related VPN use, or — worse — leaves the question ambiguous enough that any VPN use becomes prosecutable at the state's discretion, does not solve a narrow problem. It hands enforcement authorities a pretext to prosecute the much larger population of VPN users for unrelated reasons, under cover of a popular anti-gambling law.
The proportionality test lawmakers are skipping
A proportionate version of this law would target supply, not demand: platform operators, local agents, and payment processors — precisely the tiers Mahrous's bill already addresses — while leaving individual users and the general legality of VPN software alone. Criminalizing the tool rather than the transaction is where the current drafting direction goes wrong. It also won't work on its own terms: determined bettors will simply rotate VPN providers faster than the NTRA can block them, exactly as has happened with the 600-plus sites already blocked since 2017. Meanwhile, blocking 80% of betting apps while leaving VPN policy undefined creates a two-tier outcome — casual users get pushed toward VPNs by the blocking campaign itself, then face prosecution risk under a law parliament hasn't decided whether to apply to them.
The more defensible path is the one Mahrous's draft already gestures toward: heavier penalties concentrated on operators and payment facilitators, blocking orders that target platforms rather than circumvention tools, and explicit statutory language that Article 14 does not apply to VPN use for purposes unrelated to gambling. Absent that clarity, Egypt risks solving a real problem — youth gambling losses — by expanding a surveillance and censorship power that already has a documented history of catching independent media and ordinary privacy-conscious users in its net.