What this site is for
PayoutMitra helps people in India recover money that is stuck — in a gaming wallet that stopped paying out, behind a rejected KYC check, or in a UPI transfer that debited and never arrived.
That mission is a consequence of the law. The Promotion and Regulation of Online Gaming Act, 2025 (PROGA) received presidential assent on 22 August 2025, the rules were notified on 22 April 2026, and the prohibition on online money games took effect on 1 May 2026. The ban is absolute: it covers any game where a player pays a fee or deposits money expecting a monetary return, with no exception for games of skill. Every major Indian operator — Dream11, MPL, RummyCircle, My11Circle, Junglee Rummy, PokerBaazi, Adda52, A23, Zupee, WinZO and RummyCulture — suspended cash play in late August 2025. Their current status is tracked in our RMG app shutdown tracker.
So the useful question in India today is no longer “which app should I play”. It is “how do I get my balance out of an app that has stopped taking deposits”. That is the only question this site tries to answer.
We do not test apps, and we say so
Most review sites in this category claim hands-on testing — sign-up runs, test deposits, timed withdrawals, support-response stopwatches. PayoutMitra makes no such claim.
We do not deposit money into online money games, because offering, playing or facilitating payment for them is now a criminal offence in India, and because a test deposit into a wind-down wallet would tell you nothing useful. We do not publish star ratings of gaming apps, because we have no first-hand basis for one and a rating would read as a recommendation to play.
Where a page reports a number — a processing time, a minimum withdrawal, a TDS rate, a helpline — that number comes from a named document, not from our own experience, and the page says which document.
Where our facts come from
We work down this order, and stop at the highest tier that answers the question.
- Statute and regulator text. PROGA itself and the Online Gaming Rules 2026; RBI circulars (notably the Turn Around Time and customer-compensation circular for failed transactions, and the limited-liability circular for unauthorised electronic banking transactions); NPCI circulars on UPI dispute handling; CBDT notifications on TDS under Section 194BA.
- The operator’s own published notice. A wind-down page, an in-app banner or a press statement from the company is the authority on what that company has promised its users. Where we cite one, we link it.
- Court and enforcement filings. Karnataka High Court and Supreme Court orders in the operator challenges; Enforcement Directorate actions where they affect whether a balance can move.
- Named reporting from established outlets, used for dates and sequence of events, and cross-checked against at least one other outlet before we rely on it.
Anonymous forum posts, screenshots we cannot attribute, and app-store review text are not sources. They can tell us a problem exists and is worth writing about; they never supply a fact we state as true.
How we handle what we do not know
Three rules govern the gaps, and they matter more than the sourcing hierarchy.
- An unverified claim is labelled unverified. If we cannot confirm the current status of an operator’s refund process, the page says we could not confirm it and names what we checked.
- We do not publish aggregate statistics we did not collect. No success rates, no average recovery times, no “based on N cases” sample sizes. If we have not counted something, no number appears.
- Dates are attached to volatile facts. Helpline numbers, escalation addresses and processing windows change. Where a page states one, it states when that was last checked against the source.
Corrections
Facts in this area go stale quickly, and a stale helpline number or escalation route can cost somebody their money.
If something here is wrong — a number has changed, an operator has updated its wind-down policy, a rule has been amended — tell us and we will fix it. Corrections take priority over new work, and a corrected page carries an updated review date.
- Email: contact@payoutmitra.com
- Subject: “Correction: [page name]“
Independence
No operator can pay for coverage, placement, ranking or a more favourable description on this site. There is no sponsored slot and no paid listing tier. We do not link to live online money games, because promoting them to users in India is unlawful under PROGA — the outbound links on this site go to regulators, courts, helplines and operators’ own wind-down notices.
Who writes this
Rohan Mehta — Payments and Consumer-Recovery Editor
Rohan covers Indian digital payments and consumer protection as they apply to stranded gaming balances. His work is built on primary material — NPCI circulars, RBI guidelines and CBDT notifications — rather than second-hand summaries, because regulatory accuracy is the whole product when someone is trying to get money back.
His focus areas are UPI transaction disputes, TDS compliance and the gaming TDS refund process, the consumer grievance ladder under Indian law, and the PROGA framework.
Responsible gaming
The cash formats are gone, but the harm they caused did not leave with them. If you or someone you know is struggling with compulsive gaming, our gambling addiction help page for India lists helplines — including Tele-MANAS (14416), iCALL and the Vandrevala Foundation — with the official source for each number and the date it was last checked.
Update policy
- Regulatory changes first. When the PROGA rules are amended, or the RBI or NPCI issues a circular affecting gaming payments, we update every affected page and re-date it.
- A visible review date on every page. The date stamp is the date someone last checked the page against its sources — not the publication date.
- Recovery routes are re-checked as operators wind down. Support channels thin out and escalation addresses move as these companies shrink; a route that worked in March may be dead by September, and that is exactly the kind of change we try to catch.
If you are trying to get a balance out of an app that has shut its cash formats, start with recovering a balance from a shut-down app.