Since April 2024, more than ₦900 million belonging to 114 SportyBet customers has remained frozen, unresolved, and unexplained by relevant authorities. The sports betting company justified the restriction by alleging that the funds were tied to bot-driven fraudulent activity requiring investigation.
But the customers had, and still has a contrary view: they were legitimately won, and, as a result, the funds were being wrongfully withheld.
A Lagos High Court, asked to intervene in the dispute in November 2024, almost two years ago, declined to; not because the question being asked never mattered, but because the court found it wasn’t yet equipped to answer it. Two years after, the question remains unanswered, and nobody, including the relevant regulatory bodies the customers had petitioned, is, publicly, willing to.
Interestingly, a similar case, involving same betting brand, in another clime, Kenya, leading to the brand suspending its operations in the country, before it was eventually resolved, gives an insight into the complexion of the case.
The case, though not too complementary for the brand, provides a clue for one to understand what regulatory follow-through is capable of providing, when done to the letters.
In 2022, the Kenya Revenue Authority moved against Sporty Bet over an alleged KSh 5 billion tax shortfall, covering the 2018 to 2021 period, accusing it of significantly under-declaring its income. The development led to the decision of Kenya Betting Control and Licensing Board, a body saddled with the responsibilities of regulating betting activities in the country, suspended the company’s operating licence. Its bank accounts and mobile-money paybill numbers were also frozen.
Unable to access its own funds, Sporty Bet ceased its operations, entirely, in Kenya, joining a wider wave of betting operators, including Betway and Betking, that exited the market during the same period of intensified tax enforcement.
That was not the end of the story. In 2025, Sporty Bet returned to Kenya, after resolving its dispute with the tax authority and securing fresh licensing from Kenyan regulators. Interestingly, while the details of the settlement itself have not been made fully public, the shape of the process is, however, clear and documented. A regulator made a specific allegation, took concrete enforcement action, and the matter eventually reached a resolution that allowed the company back into the market under the terms the regulators were prepared comfortable with, and ready to sign off on.
The Nigerian Version…
The Nigerian version of this story has none of those landmarks yet. The frozen accounts, the 114 petitioning customers, the five regulatory and law-enforcement bodies named in their petitions, the company’s own public claim of partnership with two of those bodies, none of those has produced a public enforcement action, a settlement, or even a status update.
Till date, despite the protests, the frustrations and the concerns being expressed by the affected customers of the company, till date, the Nigerian equivalent of Kenya’s action is yet to be seen.
For instance, unlike in Kenya, no licence suspension, no equivalent of the frozen paybill numbers, and no equivalent of the eventual, disclosed resolution yet, by any of the regulatory authorities complained to.. What we’ve had as a response to the original freeze, has been a court judgment that carefully avoided ruling on the underlying dispute, and two years of quiet.
While not assuming the relevant regulatory authorities have done nothing; since such investigations are not always visible, while being conducted, but the contrast with the Kenya situation is that there are no activities or process indicating efforts are being made to answer the question.
Kenyan authorities were willing. They eventually acted publicly and decisively enough that the outcome became known, to the company, to the market, and to the public.
Nigerian authorities, petitioned by more than a hundred of their own citizens over a nine-figure sum, have not yet reached that same point of visibility, more than two years after the original complaint was filed.
The deeper question extends beyond one company. When a dispute between a consumer and a digital platform goes unresolved, not for weeks, but for years, what mechanism is actually supposed to force an answer? Kenya’s tax authority provided one kind of answer, however slow and however costly to the businesses and customers caught in the middle. Nigeria’s regulators, so far, are yet to demonstrate this.
Sporty Bet’s customers are not asking for a verdict handed down in the press. They are asking for the same thing any regulator, in any market, ought to be able to provide eventually: a clear public answer to a question that has now been open for more than two years.
