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.
The short answer, because you probably came here for one thing. Telebirr is not a working way to fund a betting account in Ethiopia any more, and that is not an accident or a glitch at Ethio Telecom.
When the Ethiopian Lottery Service revoked every betting licence on 15 December 2025, the directive covered the money as well as the bets. Betting firms had to stop taking wagers, payment systems tied to betting accounts were to be disabled, and financial institutions were told to freeze transactions connected to the revoked companies, with monitoring to check they did.
Why I take this particular subject personally
I worked on the payments side in Addis for years before I started writing about betting, and Telebirr settlement problems were my daily bread. So when I tell you the deposit rail and the withdrawal rail are two different systems, it is not a theory I read somewhere.
Here is what that means for you in practice. A deposit is instant because the operator wants your money inside. Getting it out again runs through a completely different process, often with a different provider agreement behind it, and that is the one nobody tests until the morning it fails. When a payment aggregator is told to freeze anything touching a revoked operator, guess which of those two directions stops first.
What this looked like from the other side
Before December, this sector was pushing between 800 million and one billion birr through payment rails every single day. The allegation that followed was that more than 100 billion birr had been kept off the books, routed through crypto exchanges and hawala-style networks, with domestic payment aggregators accused of obscuring the real volumes.
Whatever the courts eventually make of that, the practical result is already here: anything that looks like betting flow through a regulated Ethiopian rail is now something the institution has a direct instruction to stop and a reason to look at closely.
So what about the sites still offering it?
Some operators still list Telebirr in their cashier. I could not verify a single one of them, because every site I checked keeps its cashier behind registration, and I am not going to open accounts and deposit money to write a page. What I will tell you is how to think about it.
- If a site advertises Telebirr and the payment goes through instantly, ask yourself what it is actually settling against, because the direct route was ordered closed.
- A workaround built to look like an ordinary transfer is still a workaround. If it gets flagged later, the account it touched is yours, not the operator’s.
- Withdrawal is where these arrangements break. Money can find a way in through a side door long after the front door for getting it out has been shut.
- Anyone telling you they hold an Ethiopian licence in 2026 is not telling you the truth. There are none. The regulator confirmed this again on 30 July 2026.
If you have money stuck right now
Pull your Telebirr statement and find the deposits, with dates and reference numbers. Screenshot your balance and account number while the operator’s site still loads. Save any bet history you can reach.
I am not being dramatic. Lalibet is currently showing a maintenance page that says, in its own words, that bet placement and withdrawals both resume once services reopen, with no date attached. Habesha Bet’s address does not even belong to a betting company any more. Documentation is the only thing that travels with you when a company disappears.
How to read your own Telebirr statement
This is the practical skill I would most want you to take from this page, and it takes two minutes.
Open your Telebirr transaction history and find the payment. Look at the receiving party as it is written there, not the brand name on the website you were using. Those two are frequently different, and the difference is the entire story.
- The name matches the betting brand. Straightforward, and increasingly rare.
- The name is a company you have never heard of. The operator is settling through a third party. That is not automatically sinister, but it means the entity holding your money is not the one you chose.
- The name is an individual. Stop. A personal account receiving betting deposits has no business relationship with you at all, and no route exists to recover anything from it.
- The transaction shows as pending far longer than usual. That is what a freeze instruction looks like from the customer side. It is about the counterparty, not about you.
Whatever you find, screenshot it. If this ever needs explaining, to a bank, to the regulator, or to yourself in six months, the reference number and the beneficiary name are what the conversation will turn on.
Where you can actually put money instead
If you are reading this from outside Ethiopia, ordinary international methods still work with the handful of operators still standing, and Telebirr was never going to be your route anyway. If you are here in the country, my honest advice is to wait. There is no licensing pathway open, no timeline, and a regulator that has already warned people are presenting themselves as licensed when nobody is.
- 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.