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.
CBE Birr is a bank rail, and that is exactly why this page reads differently from the Telebirr one. Mobile money and a bank account sit under different supervision, and when the instruction came down in December it landed hardest on the banks.
The revocation directive of 15 December 2025 told financial institutions to freeze transactions tied to the revoked betting companies and put monitoring in place to confirm they had. The Commercial Bank of Ethiopia is state-owned. Of every institution in the country, it is the least likely to quietly keep a betting channel open and hope nobody notices.
What a freeze instruction actually does inside a bank
People imagine a switch being thrown. It is closer to a list. Merchant identifiers connected to the named companies get flagged, and anything matching them gets stopped and reviewed rather than settled. I sat next to this process for years, so let me tell you the part that matters to you: the list is about the counterparty, not about you.
That means a payment can look completely ordinary from your side, leave your account normally, and still sit unsettled for days at the other end because of who is receiving it. It also means that when an operator finds a way to keep taking deposits, the receiving entity is often no longer the one named on the website.
The question I would ask before using CBE Birr on a betting site
- Who is actually named on the transaction when it leaves your account? If it is a company you have never heard of, that mismatch is the whole story.
- Can you find any evidence at all that the same route works in reverse, for a withdrawal? Deposits are the easy direction and they prove nothing.
- Is the operator claiming an Ethiopian licence? If yes, that claim is false. The regulator said again on 30 July 2026 that no organisation holds one.
- If this payment were reviewed six months from now, would you be comfortable explaining it? The monitoring instruction did not come with an expiry date.
A word about the numbers behind all this
The sector was moving 800 million to one billion birr a day before December. The allegation that triggered the crackdown was that more than 100 billion birr never reached the state, routed instead through crypto exchanges and hawala-style networks, with payment aggregators accused of hiding the volumes.
Twenty-four people were arrested in November 2025 and all twenty-four were released in January 2026 with no explanation offered. I mention that because it cuts both ways, and I am not going to pretend the story is settled when it plainly is not. What is settled is the licensing position, and that is what affects your money.
What a frozen transaction looks like from your side
People expect a freeze to produce an error message. It usually does not, and knowing the real signs saves you from repeating a payment that already went out.
- The money leaves your account normally and the confirmation arrives as usual. Nothing on your side looks wrong, because nothing on your side is wrong.
- The balance never appears on the betting platform, or appears and then reverses hours later.
- A reversal arrives days later with no explanation. That is the settlement being unwound at the other end, which is the normal outcome when a beneficiary is flagged.
- Support tells you it is a technical delay. Sometimes true. Ask them to name the receiving entity and see whether the answer matches your statement.
The most important rule: do not send it again. A repeated payment to a flagged counterparty is two frozen transactions instead of one, and both of them have your name on the sending side. Wait for the first to resolve, keep the reference numbers, and take it up with your bank rather than with the operator.
If you deposited by CBE Birr and cannot get it out
Your bank statement is your friend here in a way a mobile wallet history is not. Pull the full record, find the transactions, note the beneficiary name exactly as it appears rather than the brand you thought you were paying. Screenshot your balance on the operator’s site while it still loads.
Complaints go to the Ethiopian Lottery Service. I will be straight with you: the regulator revoked every licence and has indicated the losses are not recoverable. Filing costs nothing and puts your case on a record. Expecting it to bring the birr back is setting yourself up for a second disappointment.
- 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
- 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
- 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
- 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
- The main domain still resolves and still holds a valid certificate, so the brand has not been abandoned entirely
Dawit Bekele. I spent years on the payments side in Addis, working settlement problems on Telebirr and CBE Birr before I started writing about betting sites. Everything on this page was checked by hand on 25 August 2026. If I have something wrong, write and tell me and I will change it.