Last Updated on August 25, 2026 by Dawit Bekele

This review is for players outside Ethiopia: the Ethiopian Lottery Service suspended the licences of all operators.

I checked 59 Ethiopian betting brands by hand on 25 August 2026, one address at a time, and wrote down what the browser actually returned. Six are still open and working. The rest are closed, blocked, parked, sold, or quietly replaced by somebody else’s pages sitting on the address you were about to type.

None of the six holds an Ethiopian licence, because there is no such thing any more. The Ethiopian Lottery Service revoked every licence in the country on 15 December 2025 and confirmed on 30 July 2026 that nothing has changed. If you came here from a search, typing a brand name to find out whether it is safe to deposit, the honest answer for most of them is that there is nothing left to deposit into.

A quick glance at the top betting sites in Ethiopia

Here is the whole picture in one table. Status is what I saw with my own eyes, not what the operator claims and not what another comparison site told me.

3.5/5

• Loaded properly from outside the country, with prices that were actually moving
• Three betslips side by side, so you can build a coupon and keep a single running at the same time
• Serious depth on the big fixtures: over 1,400 extra markets on one Champions League match

Play Now

Review

3/5

• The widest sport list of anyone here, all the way out to CS:GO, Dota 2, Valorant and chess
• You can use it in English, Amharic or Swahili
• Real Android and iOS apps rather than a browser page in a wrapper

Play Now

Review

2.5/5

• Genuinely busy: a winners ticker running constantly with odd, small ETB amounts rather than tidy round numbers
• The biggest jackpot counter of anyone still standing, showing over 13,500,000 ETB and actually populated
• Wide game library across a dozen categories, including Aviator and the crash games most people come for
• Loads fast from outside Ethiopia with no country block

Play Now

Review

2/5

• The one operator that took the regulator to court rather than going quiet, and the only one that got a ruling
• Built for us and it shows: the slogan on the footer reads “By Ethiopians for Ethiopians”
• Site itself is fast, in Amharic and English, with three betslips and a coupon-code lookup
• Instant games are still there: Aviator, JetX, Fast Keno, MultiHot5 and Chicken all load

Play Now

Review

2/5

• The site is up and loads normally from abroad
• Three ways to reach support, all published: live chat, [email protected], and a phone number on +251 907 797 974
• A withdrawals ticker naming recent payouts, mostly small and in the 200 to 3,000 ETB range

Play Now

Review

1/5

Review

1/5

• They put up a notice instead of leaving a dead page, and they wrote it in Amharic as well as English
• The domain and the certificate are still being paid for, so somebody is still there

Review

1/5

• The main domain still resolves and still holds a valid certificate, so the brand has not been abandoned entirely

Review

In-depth reviews of the sites still standing

Vamos Bet: the only one that behaved like a proper book

Vamos Bet was the single operator where everything worked the way a sportsbook should. The prices were live and, more importantly, sensible. Sabah Baku against Hapoel Be’er Sheva at 1.87, 3.78 and 3.50. LASK Linz against Celtic at 1.98, 3.64 and 3.26. Bodo-Glimt against NEC Nijmegen at 1.43, 4.97 and 5.43. Valencia against Real Betis at 2.78, 3.14 and 2.45. When a skin has been abandoned the numbers stop making sense against each other within about thirty seconds of looking. These made sense.

The counters read 1,228 football markets, 415 table tennis, 82 tennis, 53 basketball, 51 ice hockey, 42 handball, 28 volleyball, 20 combat sports and 14 cricket. So it is a football book with a basketball tab, and you should know that before you deposit expecting a full NBA season. Individual fixtures carried up to 1,704 side bets, which is real depth where it counts. Three parallel betslips is the one feature here I wish everyone copied.

English only, no Amharic in the switcher, and no licence statement anywhere. Read the full Vamos Bet review.

BestBet: the widest menu, and most of it is empty

BestBet lists thirty-nine sports, more than anyone else serving this market: Counter-Strike, Dota 2, League of Legends, Valorant, Mobile Legends, King of Glory, chess, darts, biathlon, and a tab called TV Shows and Movies.

Then you count what sits behind the names. Football 1,045 markets and table tennis 407, after which it collapses. Tennis 265, American football 155, ice hockey 63, boxing 54, basketball 40, handball 37, rugby union 19, volleyball 18, rugby league 13. Thirty-nine sports on the menu and thirteen rugby league markets behind the door.

It runs in English, Amharic and Swahili and offers real Android and iOS apps. That Swahili option matters: it suggests a regional skin serving several countries rather than something built for Ethiopia. No licence statement anywhere, not even an expired one. Read the full BestBet review.

Telebet: the busiest room still open

Casino-led despite the name, and the one place that still felt like it had people in it. A ticker named winners while I watched: 1,350 ETB off Auto Roulette, 4,080 on Diamond Forever, 1,600 from Master Joker, 1,990 off Aviator, 12,000 from Gold. Above it, a jackpot counter above 13,500,000 ETB, the only jackpot meter I found on any Ethiopian site actually showing a number.

Call something Telebet in this country and people hear Telebirr. Nothing on the site states any relationship with Ethio Telecom’s payment service. The page title says what it really is: Play Online Casino. Sport is one tab out of fifteen. Read the full Telebet review.

QwickBirr: still advertising a licence that was revoked

The most useful thing on QwickBirr is in the footer, where it still states the operator is licensed by the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia National Lottery Administration under licence number ስ/ው/ብሎ/60/2012. That licence was revoked on 15 December 2025.

The lobby is a wall of slots with Sport as one tab among thirteen. Four jackpot meters sit top-left and every one read 0 ETB while the banners on the right advertised 225,000 ETB and a 6,000,000 ETB challenge. To its credit it publishes real contact details: +251 907 797 974, [email protected] and a chat tab. Read the full QwickBirr review.

Hulusport: the one that went to court, and the one you cannot bet on

When the licences were revoked most operators went quiet or vanished. Hulusport went to court and won on procedural grounds, though a stay was granted afterwards so the matter is not settled. Winning on procedure is not the same as being cleared, but after nine months of companies going dark without a word, I notice one that argued in front of a judge instead.

And then you try to place a bet. The fixture board reads THE BOARD WENT OFF-AIR, the sports panel is an empty heading, and nothing loads. The instant games work. So does the affiliate programme, still sitting in the main menu. The football feed costs money every month and it is off. Read the full Hulusport review.

VivaGame and ScoreBet: working, not yet reviewed

VivaGame at vivagame.et is a pure casino with no sportsbook at all: slots, crash, table and live sections, a LiveChat widget, and a winners ticker showing figures around 28,669 and 29,341 ETB. ScoreBet at scorebet.com runs bet codes, a daily coupon and a published company profile, which is more corporate documentation than most of this market offers. Both loaded properly. Neither has a full review here yet, and I would rather say that than rate something I have only glanced at.

How I judge an Ethiopian betting site

Every comparison site has a framework and most of them are decoration. Mine has four parts and the order is deliberate, because it reflects what actually costs people money in this market.

1. Does the money come back out?

This sits first because it is the only question that matters and almost nobody tests it. A deposit is instant because the operator wants your money inside. Withdrawal runs on a different rail, often under a different provider agreement, and it is the one nobody checks until the morning it fails. I will tell you honestly that I could not verify this on a single operator here, because every one keeps its cashier behind registration.

2. Is the platform actually reachable and running?

Sounds trivial, and it is currently the single biggest differentiator in Ethiopian betting. Fifty-three of the fifty-nine brands I checked failed at this step. A site that will not load, or loads with an empty fixture board, has no odds worth comparing.

3. Sports coverage, measured rather than listed

A menu of thirty-nine sports means nothing. The market count next to each sport means everything, and it is printed right there on the page for anyone willing to read it. That is why the numbers in these reviews are counts rather than adjectives.

4. What the operator says about itself

Licence claims, contact details, terms pages, responsible gambling information. Not because a licence exists to check any more, but because a company that maintains the pages nobody clicks is telling you something about how it maintains the cashier.

What you will not find in my framework is bonus size. A welcome offer is a recruitment cost, it is the cheapest thing an operator can put on a page, and weighting it is how comparison sites end up rating every brand ten out of ten.

How the market was shut down

If you have been away from this for a few months, here is the whole story in order.

Behind all of it lay one allegation: was that more than 100 billion birr had been kept from the state, moved through crypto exchanges and hawala-style transfer networks, with domestic payment aggregators accused of obscuring the real volumes. To give that scale: before the crackdown this sector was processing somewhere between 800 million and one billion birr every day.

There is no application process open and no timeline for reopening. Government officials have suggested the position might be reconsidered, but nothing has been published that a bettor could rely on.

Payment methods, and why the old answers stopped working

Searches like “betting sites with Telebirr” no longer have the answer they had a year ago, and the reason is not technical.

December’s revocation directive reached the money as well as the bets. Financial institutions were told to freeze transactions tied to the revoked companies, with monitoring to confirm they had, and payment systems connected to betting accounts were to be shut off. So any Ethiopian rail that still appears to work inside a betting cashier today is either settling against something other than the label says, or not settling at all.

All 59 brands: what each address does today

This is the full survey. Every Ethiopian betting brand I could identify, checked one at a time on 25 August 2026.

That last category before the end is the one that surprised me most. Five brands now have an affiliate network’s review pages sitting on their own .et addresses. Type the bookmaker name you remember and you do not get the bookmaker. You get a page rating it, built from the same template as the other four. Worth knowing before you assume the address in your browser history still belongs to whoever it used to.

How to check any betting site yourself, in four seconds

You should not have to rely on me or anyone else for this. Open the address and read what comes back.

• Adverts, a shop, or a for-sale listing. The domain was abandoned or sold. Whoever is behind it has no connection to the brand.
• A blank page, three dots, or Loading forever. An empty shell with nothing behind the front end.
• A ww1 or ww12 subdomain in the address bar. A parking service, and the clearest signal there is.
• A Cloudflare block page with a ray ID. The server exists and a rule stopped you. Usually a geo-block.
• The operator’s own maintenance notice. Read every line, especially anything about withdrawals.
• A working board with prices that make sense against each other. The only state worth your money.

If you still have money with one of these operators

Get your own records together now rather than later: account number, deposit receipts from Telebirr or your bank with the beneficiary name exactly as it appears, and whatever bet history still loads. Screenshot the balance while the page still opens.

Complaints go to the Ethiopian Lottery Service on 9695. I will be honest about what that is worth: the regulator revoked every licence and has indicated the losses are not recoverable. Filing costs nothing and puts your case on a record, but expecting it to bring the birr back is setting yourself up for a second disappointment.

And be careful who contacts you. Nobody legitimate charges a fee to release a frozen balance, and there is no such process. A list of bettors with verified phone numbers is a valuable thing, and recovery scams follow collapses like this one reliably. The regulator has separately warned that operators are misrepresenting their legal status, and that dealing with unlicensed ones can expose your money and personal information to serious risk.

Why the ratings on this site look mean

You have seen the other comparison sites. Every operator scores ten out of ten, every review lists three glowing points and no drawbacks, and the button always leads to whoever pays the most. I know exactly how those pages are built, because until this month this site was one of them.

Every outbound button here used to point at the same operator, carrying a promoter code, regardless of which review you clicked from. That was wrong. It is fixed, each review now links to the operator it reviews, and we take no commission from anybody listed on this page. When a site is dead I score it a one and explain why.

Betting in Ethiopia: common questions

Is online betting legal in Ethiopia right now?

No operator holds a legal licence. The Ethiopian Lottery Service revoked all of them on 15 December 2025 and confirmed on 30 July 2026 that none had been reinstated. Any brand claiming an Ethiopian licence today is claiming something that does not exist.

Which is the best sports betting site in Ethiopia?

Of what is still running, Vamos Bet is the only one offering a full sportsbook with live prices and real depth, which is why it scores highest here. That is a statement about availability, not an endorsement, and it holds no licence either.

Can I still use Telebirr for betting?

The direct route was ordered closed in December 2025, along with every other payment system tied to betting accounts. Some sites still list it. I could not verify a single working case, and anything that does clear is worth examining on your own statement before you rely on it again.

What happened to Habesha Bet, Lalibet and Betika?

Habesha Bet’s domain now serves rotating adverts and no longer hosts a betting site at all. Lalibet is showing a maintenance notice that suspends bets and withdrawals together with no end date. Betika has posted a notice, in Amharic and English, saying it is suspended for an indefinite period.

Are new betting sites in Ethiopia worth trying?

A brand launching here in 2026 is launching without a licence, into a gap the regulator has warned people are exploiting. Several old brand names have already been bought and repointed. If a familiar name reappears with a generous offer, check whether anything about the operator is the same beyond the logo. There is a longer page on this.

How often is this page updated?

The survey above was run by hand on 25 August 2026. A site can come back the day after I look at it, so if something here is out of date, write and tell me and I will recheck it and change the row rather than leaving it and restamping the date.

Losing a licence costs you more than paperwork

People hear “unlicensed” and think of it as a paperwork problem. It is not. A licence is a set of obligations the operator owes you, and when it goes, every one of those obligations goes with it. Here is what was attached to that piece of paper.

That last row is not hypothetical. BestBet carries no company information anywhere I could find. Vamos Bet displays no licence and no entity. If something goes wrong with either, you would not know who you are dealing with or which country to deal with them in.

Which is why I keep saying the rating on this page measures the front end. I can tell you an operator’s odds are live and its interface works. I cannot tell you there is anything standing behind it, because for the first time in this market there demonstrably is not.

How to protect yourself when nobody else will

Tools that normally sit between a person and real harm are largely absent from this market right now. That is not a reason to panic. It is a reason to build your own, because no operator is currently being made to build them for you.

• Withdraw early and often. Do not let a balance accumulate on a platform you cannot verify. Money you have taken out is money that cannot be frozen by a maintenance notice.
• Test the exit before the entrance. Make a small withdrawal work before you deposit anything you would mind losing. If nobody can show you a completed payout from an operator, assume there is not one.
• Keep your own records outside the operator’s app. Screenshots of balances and bet history, and payment statements showing the beneficiary name as it appears on your side.
• Never reuse a password on a betting account. These platforms are changing hands, going dark, and in at least one case being repointed at unrelated advertisers. Your details go wherever the server goes.
• Remove apps for brands that have closed. An installed app talks to a specific domain, and those domains are being sold. Habesha Bet’s now serves rotating adverts including, on one of my visits, adult content.
• Set your own limit before you open the site, not after. Nothing on these platforms will stop you.

Warning signs worth knowing

Here is the part of the job I brought with me from payments, where you see the pattern in the data long before anybody says a word about it. If you recognise your own account here, you do not need permission to stop and you do not have to call it a problem first.

• Deposits get smaller and more frequent. One transfer of 2,000 birr becomes fifteen of 200. That shift is the clearest single signal there is, and it almost always comes first.
• Deposits move to late at night. The hours between midnight and four are where it shows up before anything else changes.
• The source changes. Money starts arriving from a second account, or a relative’s, or an agent counter instead of a bank app. That is somebody routing around their own record.
• Withdrawals stop entirely. Not fewer. None. Money going in and nothing coming out over weeks means it has stopped being treated as money.

There is more on this on the responsible gambling page, including the things that work better than willpower. Nobody at this site profits from your losses, which means that page costs me nothing to write honestly.

Where this leaves you

If you are outside Ethiopia, six operators are reachable and working, and Vamos Bet is the only one offering a full sportsbook with genuine depth. None of them is licensed here, all of them keep the cashier behind registration, and I have not been able to verify a single completed withdrawal.

If you are inside the country, my honest advice has not changed since December. There is no licensing pathway open, no timeline, and a regulator warning that people are presenting themselves as licensed when nobody is. Waiting costs you nothing. The alternative has already cost a lot of people a great deal.

Updates land here when the position changes, and only when it changes. If you have first-hand experience of a withdrawal from any operator listed here, write and tell me what happened and how long it took. Your details stay out of it. That single piece of information is the one thing this page is still missing, and no amount of checking from the outside can supply it.