Nepal

Nepal maintains a bifurcated gambling regime: general gambling and betting is criminally prohibited under the Penal Code 2074, while a narrow licensed land-based casino track, open to foreigners only, operates under Casino Regulation 2070 on a one-casino-per-licence basis. Online gambling and betting are explicitly and separately banned regardless of offshore hosting. This period's dominant development is the Tourism Bill 2081's clause-by-clause House of Representatives review, which has drawn 263 lawmaker amendments concentrated on casino provisions, touching supervisory structure, foreign-ownership limits and anti-money-laundering obligations. Enforcement against unlicensed online gambling has intensified in parallel, with a coordinated Cyber Bureau action and reported crypto-linked settlement of unlicensed betting flows, indicating a regulatory environment that is tightening on multiple fronts simultaneously even as its underlying casino-licensing architecture remains under active legislative debate.

Casino licensing in Nepal sits with the Department of Tourism under Casino Regulation 2070, which establishes a one-casino-per-licence framework restricted to foreign patrons. This structure has not changed this period, but its institutional future is under active debate: the Tourism Bill 2081 proposes an independent Casino Regulatory Unit, with competing proposals as to whether it should sit under the Department of Tourism or the Ministry of Culture, Tourism and Civil Aviation. The bill is undergoing clause-by-clause review in the House of Representatives, having drawn 263 lawmaker amendments concentrated on casino provisions, alongside proposed beneficial-ownership disclosure at a ten-percent-plus threshold, mandatory KYC and Financial Intelligence Unit monitoring, and a reduced foreign-ownership ceiling. No primary bill text or enactment date has been located; the above rests on corroborated trade-press and law-firm secondary reporting rather than government-published text.

Online gambling market entry is legally untenable: the explicit ISP-level ban and criminal prohibition under the National Gambling (Control) Act 2043 BS foreclose any lawful online operation. Land-based casino entry requires Department of Tourism approval, 5-star hotel infrastructure, a foreign-national-only customer base and NPR 300 million minimum paid-up capital — irrelevant to online operators. FATF grey-list status adds material AML risk to any financial engagement.

Nepal Rastra Bank requires explicit approval for any casino foreign-currency handling and has issued PSP/MFS account-freeze guidelines targeting terrorist-sanction-list and gambling-linked accounts. No lawful online gambling payment channel exists. Nepal's FATF grey-list status requires enhanced due diligence on Nepal-connected gambling flows, and the APG's May 2026 blacklisting warning intensifies this.

All gambling marketing directed at Nepal is prohibited. Online casino and betting advertising is banned, physical casino marketing is restricted to the hotel context for foreign guests, and there is no lawful affiliate, sponsorship or digital marketing channel. Nepali actors have been arrested for promoting offshore betting brands such as 1xBet under the Advertisement Regulation Act.

The Department of Tourism's new twelve-point compliance directive mandates continuous CCTV coverage of casino gaming areas with six months of footage retention, alongside new documentary and payout-verification requirements for licensed operators. This is a regulator circular imposing concrete technical surveillance and record-retention obligations rather than a statutory amendment, and represents a tightening of the technical-compliance baseline that applies immediately to existing licensees, independent of whatever the Tourism Bill 2081 ultimately settles for the sector's institutional structure.

Nepal's distribution-control approach for prohibited online gambling has formalised around network-level blocking: a nationwide ISP-level block on online gambling sites and apps was reportedly ordered, extending the state's enforcement reach beyond individual prosecution to comprehensive access denial at the internet-service-provider layer. This is a materially more comprehensive distribution-control mechanism than previously documented, though the finding rests on a single T4 secondary source and has not been corroborated by a primary regulatory or telecoms-authority notice this cycle, and is accordingly held at uncertain confidence. No app-store delisting, search-engine de-listing, or payment-provider platform restriction specific to gambling was identified in the evidence available this cycle; the blocking mechanism as evidenced is confined to network-level ISP action.

On 21 October 2026, police raided the Golden Finger Gaming Zone, a licensed casino in Birgunj, and detained five people for allegedly allowing Nepali citizens to enter and gamble, in breach of the rule reserving licensed casino gambling to foreign nationals. The action is corroborated across two outlets reporting the same incident and date. The underlying statutory position criminalises Nepali citizens who enter a casino or gamble there, and separately exposes the casino operator and staff who permit this; imprisonment of up to three months and a fine have been cited for the gambling offence in secondary commentary, with harsher figures cited for a related betting offence. The clearest licence-revocation risk driver visible in the record is precisely this breach: a licensed venue admitting Nepali nationals onto the gaming floor. Set against this specific event, a Financial Action Task Force progress report ahead of the 28-30 October 2026 Plenary continues to flag casinos as a weakly supervised high-risk sector within Nepal's grey-list action plan, though no Nepal-specific casino anti-money-laundering circular or supervisory measure has been identified alongside that commentary. Together, the two strands show active policing of the entry rule at venue level and sustained external scrutiny of sector-wide supervision, without, on the present record, any new enforcement power or instrument having been introduced.

No online gambling liberalisation is foreseeable. The FATF grey-listing (February 2025) is driving tightening rather than opening, and the proposed Integrated Tourism Bill would further restrict the land-based casino framework — capping foreign ownership at 49%, requiring hotels to own at least 10% of on-premises casinos, making licences location-specific and non-transferable, and pushing the minimum border distance to 5 km. The APG's May 2026 intervention and the decisive September 2026 review mean continued international pressure and blacklisting risk.