The Indian government said on Wednesday that 129 gambling websites were blocked earlier this year based on two falsified orders from state high courts.
The fake orders were first reported by Reuters, which discovered two orders for website blocking issued by the Indian Department of Telecommunications (DoT) were based on purported orders from the high courts in the provinces of Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh that did not actually exist. The fake court orders were sent to DoT in July and August, and each led to website bans within a few days.
After finding no mention of the court orders cited by DoT in the online registration systems of the two high courts, Reuters contacted the registrar of the Rajasthan High Court, whose signature appeared on the phony court document. The registrar said his signature “appears to be fraudulent.”
The high court in Allahabad, Uttar Pradesh, announced the court order cited by DoT was “fake” and launched a police investigation. The investigators appeared to have some unnamed suspects in mind, but have yet to announce any arrests.
Reuters noted that DoT has yet to pull down the phony court orders from its website, or rescind the website blocking orders that were based on them. The agency did not respond to requests for comment on the situation.
One disturbing aspect of the incident is that Indian officials know they have a problem with fake court orders, all the way up to the national Supreme Court.
DoT officials emailed back and forth for about ten days in August, wondering about the authenticity of the order from the Allahabad High Court, before deciding to “take immediate necessary action” and block 95 betting websites. It does not appear to have taken much effort for Reuters to check the Allahabad High Court’s online registration system to determine the order was fake.
Last week, social media platform X discovered that police orders demanding a ban on two of India’s top free speech groups, the Internet Freedom Foundation (IFF) and Software Freedom Law Center India (SFLC.in) were fakes. The phony orders invoked India’s draconian content removal laws to punish the two groups for allegedly “defaming” a Hindu nationalist group.
“It turns out this was somebody playing an impostor, somebody impersonating Delhi police who has sent this,” an X lawyer told the High Court in Delhi after the company conducted an internal investigation.
X actually identified the impostor as a 17-year-old student from Srinagar who posed as a Delhi Police official.
India changed its already heavy-handed rules for content restriction in February 2026, shortening the time limit for compliance from 36 hours to just three hours. Press freedom groups say the number of content blocks and account bans ordered by the Indian government skyrocketed after this rule was changed, because Internet providers are afraid to spend any time challenging or investigating the orders.
Facebook’s parent company, Meta, actually created a software bridge to India’s censorship system, known as the Sayhog portal after the Hindi word for “collaboration,” so that censorship demands from the Indian police can be processed immediately and automatically, without oversight from Meta staffers.
This has apparently created an environment where websites can be blocked with fake court orders, which sail through the system because government officials are eager to process them, and private sector companies are afraid to challenge their authenticity.
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