How Countries Block Gambling Websites

Making a betting site unreachable is one of the most widely used ways a country enforces its gambling law, and it is done in more than one way. The mechanism matters, because each one fails differently and each one says something different about the market behind it.

Of the 107 published country guides on this site, 73 described some form of site blocking when they were last counted, on 7 October 2026. A count like that dates quickly. This page covers how the blocking is done; the detail for any one country, with its sources, is on that country's guide.

The Regulator Orders It Directly

The arrangement that surprises people most is the one where no court is involved. France's Autorité Nationale des Jeux describes its own process on its blacklist page: a report "permettra à nos équipes d'ouvrir une enquête et, le cas échéant, de réaliser un blocage administratif" — allows its teams to open an investigation and, where applicable, carry out administrative blocking.

Norway went further in the same direction, with DNS blocking from the start of 2025 where, as its guide puts it, the authority — not a court — decides which sites internet providers must block.

A Statutory Register That Providers Must Enforce

The most transparent model is a public list with a legal obligation attached. Poland maintains a register of domains offering gambling in violation of its Gambling Act, and internet providers must block what is on it within 48 hours. Switzerland, Greece, Estonia, Italy and Romania all run some version of it.

Where the list is published, the mechanism is auditable: anyone can read it, which is why the counts in this area are knowable at all — and why they are on the individual country guides, where each one carries its source, rather than on this page, where they would be out of date within months.

Blocking the Money Instead of the Domain

A domain is cheap to change and a payment route is not, which is why several countries went after payments. Norway has required banks to block transfers to foreign gambling companies since 2010 and tightened the rules in 2019 to cover intermediaries acting on their behalf. Finland has moved the same way, and Singapore can block both access and payments.

For a player this is the mechanism most likely to be noticed, because it does not stop a site loading. It stops a deposit, or a withdrawal.

National Filtering and Criminal Enforcement

In China, gambling sites sit behind the same national filtering as everything else, and the enforcement effort runs at both domains and people — its guide records thousands of sites blocked and thousands of arrests in the same year. Indonesia, Thailand and Turkey run large-scale blocking programmes as declared national policy. The numbers involved are very large and change constantly; each country's guide carries the current figure and where it came from.

Courts, and Blocking That Did Not Hold

Blocking is not always the regulator's to order, and it does not always survive. In Chile the Supreme Court ordered telecoms to block, and in Denmark blocking runs through the courts too — its guide records 98 sites blocked in 2026 after a Frederiksberg court ruling. Argentina's routine blocking is done by provincial regulators, though the 2026 block of a prediction market came from a Buenos Aires court. In Germany, multiple courts have ruled several internet-blocking orders unlawful. Albania announced blocking of foreign betting sites and found it difficult to enforce. Sweden considered compelling providers to block everything but the state operator in 2008, declined, and eventually opened a licensed market instead.

What the set as a whole does not support is a tidy conclusion that licensing makes blocking unnecessary. Blocking appears across every kind of regime on this site — licensed markets, state monopolies and outright prohibitions alike — which is the reason this page is organised by mechanism rather than by how strict a country is. Licensing and blocking are usually done together, not instead of one another.

Prediction Markets Are the Current Frontier

The newest category added to these blocklists is not bookmakers — bookmaker blocking continues at far greater volume throughout. Event-contract platforms describe themselves as financial venues rather than gambling ones, and regulator after regulator has rejected the distinction — ordering blocks in markets including Australia, Portugal, Colombia, Spain, Poland, Hungary, Ukraine and Indonesia. The dates and the reasoning differ by country and are on each guide; the prediction markets section covers the venues themselves.

What a Block Means for a Reader

A blocked site is not necessarily a bad site, and an unblocked one is not necessarily a licensed one. Blocking describes enforcement, not quality: the same operator can be licensed in one country, blocked in a second, and unremarkable in a third.

What a block does reliably tell a reader is that their own country has decided the site should not be serving them — which means there is no local regulator to complain to if something goes wrong. Regulated versus unregulated markets sets out what that costs in practice, and what licensed operators' terms say about VPNs covers why getting around a block is the expensive way to find out.