Non GamStop Sites and Regulatory Action

Non GamStop sites are gambling websites that hold no Gambling Commission licence, so the national self-exclusion scheme does not reach them. They are advertised as an alternative to it. In law, they are simply unlicensed: section 33 of the Gambling Act 2005 makes it an offence to provide gambling facilities in Great Britain without a licence, and offshore permits do not change that.

Every few months a new crop of pages appears promising British players an escape hatch: non gamstop sites that will take a bet, take a deposit and, crucially, take a customer the national scheme has already turned away. The pitch is always the same and always slightly coy — no checks, instant play, "accepting UK players". What those pages rarely mention is that the scheme's grip and the regulator's reach are two different things, and the second one is the one that decides whether a website is a business or a busted flush.

I have spent years reading the Gambling Commission's enforcement notices, and the pattern is drearily consistent. A site appears on a Curaçao or Anjouan certificate, advertises in Britain, accepts a British card, and then discovers that the Commission's Illegal Markets team has been counting it for months. What follows is not a raid. It is a letter, a registrar referral, a search-engine removal, a quiet conversation with a payment processor — the slow strangulation of a business that cannot be paid.

The angle here is deliberate: not which offshore badge looks prettiest, but what happens to the sites that hold one and sell to Britain anyway. Gamstop Online blocks people from gambling with companies licensed in Great Britain, and the Commission's licence condition 3.5.5 makes participation in that scheme compulsory for them. Offshore operators sit outside both. That is the whole attraction, and the whole problem.

The name itself causes confusion: the scheme is often typed "gamestop", a slip borrowed from the games retailer, but it is written GamStop and it is run by The National Online Self Exclusion Scheme Limited.

If gambling is causing harm, the National Gambling Helpline is free on 0808 8020 133, 24 hours a day, every day, operated by GamCare.

What the Numbers Say About Non GamStop Gambling Sites

The illegal market in Britain is not a rumour, but nor is it the flood the affiliates imply. The Commission's analysis published on 5 November 2026, covering April 2025 to April 2026, estimates that 0.6 per cent of respondents across the whole adult population had engaged with an illegal gambling website in the previous four weeks, and a further 0.4 per cent in the past twelve months. Among people who had gambled online in the past four weeks, the estimate rises to 2.5 per cent, with another 1.5 per cent in the past year.

Set that against the commercial estimates and the picture gets murky, which is itself worth knowing. H2 Gambling Capital put staked money with illegal operators at £16.6 billion in 2025, up from around £5 billion in 2019. A Frontier Economics study for the Betting and Gaming Council conservatively estimated £2.7 billion staked online annually, with up to £1.6 billion more in person. Yield Sec, for the Campaign for Fairer Gambling, put the unregulated share at 9 per cent of an £8.8 billion market in 2025. Three methods, three answers, all of them guesses dressed as arithmetic.

What is not a guess is the enforcement ledger. Since April 2024 the Commission's Illegal Markets team has issued 3,140 cease and desist and disruption notices — 2,032 of them cease and desist, plus 774 registrar referrals, 402 host referrals and 3 payment provider referrals. It referred 447,778 Bing and Google URLs and secured 287,961 removals. Across 160 illegal sites where traffic data existed, engagement fell by an average of 32 per cent after disruption. By method, the differences are stark and instructionive: registrar blocks and website suspensions each produced an average fall in engagement of 91 per cent, GEO IP blocking 60 per cent, Bing removal 52 per cent, Google removal 30 per cent and Facebook removal 8 per cent. Hiding a site from search is a nuisance. Taking its domain away is an amputation.

The tempo is rising. Websites referred to search engines went from 124 in July to September 2024 to 321 in April to June 2025, then to 1,835 in July to September 2026, alongside 546 cease and desist notices in that quarter. Prosecutions, by contrast, sit at roughly zero: across April 2025 to March 2026 every quarter recorded 0 or 1 prosecutions commenced, one in total. That is the honest shape of the policy. Regulators disrupt, they rarely prosecute, and a site that outlasts the disruption may simply reappear under another domain.

Cease and Desist Notices

A cease and desist notice is the Commission telling an operator, in writing, to stop offering commercial gambling to British consumers. In the quarter January to March 2026 it issued 98; in July to September 2026, 546. It is not a court order and carries no immediate penalty of its own, but it is the trigger for everything downstream — the registrar referral, the host referral, the payment referral. A site that ignores one is choosing its next domain name.

Registrar and GEO IP Blocks

The Commission's own data makes the ranking plain: registrar blocks and suspensions cut engagement by an average of 91 per cent, GEO IP blocking by 60 per cent, and search removal by 30 per cent on Google. A British reader who lands on a non gamstop uk site and finds it is not the same as whether anyone in Britain can reach it at all. The domain is the weak point.

Search Engine Referrals and the Numbers Behind Them

Between April 2024 and October 2025 the Commission referred 447,778 URLs to Google and Bing and secured 287,961 removals, and it says openly that search removal makes a site harder to find without blocking access to it. Google alone accounts for 339,757 of those referrals and 108,031 went to Bing. The policy has been described as critical and still early-stage in one other respect too: reporting payment transaction data to the Visa Operator Scheme.

Which Licence a Non GamStop Site Actually Holds

The offshore badges are not interchangeable, and the differences matter more in 2026 than they did three years ago. Curaçao is in the middle of its most significant reform in two decades; Anjouan is under sustained journalistic and legal attack; Malta looks respectable but has its own unauthorised list; and Costa Rica does not issue gambling licences at all, whatever the certificate says.

Read the Curaçao column closely, because this is where most British traffic lands. The National Ordinance on Games of Chance took effect on 24 December 2024, replacing the old master-licence and sub-licence model with direct licensing by the Curaçao Gaming Authority. The four former master licensors stopped issuing on dates between 18 August 2024 and 31 January 2025, and the legacy "orange" certificates of operation ended on 15 October 2025. The CGA's own guidance states that a historic /JAZ number must not be treated as independent proof of a current licence.

The CGA's verification rules are unusually blunt and worth using. A Certificate of Operation Seal is issued only to B2C operators and only for a specific approved domain; clicking it must redirect to cert.cga.cw; and if the certificate behind the seal shows a different domain name from the one being visited, the site is displaying another operator's certificate and should be treated as unauthorised or fraudulent. Since 7 October 2026 the CGA has warned that its previous online portal will not return to service and that the old digital seal may be affected by the transition, with an alternative verification mechanism still in the works. Supplier licensing becomes fully mandatory in Curaçao from 24 December 2026.

Anjouan costs less than half what Curaçao charges and is correspondingly harder to defend. An ABC News investigation published on 31 December 2025 reported that Anjouan Licensing Services claims to have issued more than 1,300 gambling licences at around EUR 17,000 each per year, that Comoros financial intelligence officials described Anjouan Corporate Services as operating illegally, and that a former attorney-general of the Comoros called the licensing entity "an illegal entity". The authority's own response on 10 June 2026 was, in effect, an admission worth framing: "An Anjouan Internet Gaming Licence is not, and has never been presented as, a universal authorisation to operate in every country in the world." No licensing authority can exempt an operator from local law where local authorisation is required. Britain requires one.

Malta is the respectable name in the table and deserves a qualification of its own. The MGA requires a B2C licence for a Maltese or EU/EEA entity offering a gaming service from Malta, and sets minimum issued share capital of EUR 100,000 for Type 1 and Type 2 licences, EUR 40,000 for Types 3 and 4. It also publishes a list of Unauthorised URLs, warning that any reference to the MGA or a Maltese licence on those domains is false and misleading, with entries carrying notice dates as recent as 30 October 2026. A Maltese licence is a real licence. It is still not a Commission licence, and a Maltese licensee selling to Britain without one is operating unlawfully here.

Why Some Non GamStop Casino Sites Build Delay In

The cleverest offshore operators no longer promise speed. They promise deliberation. A "security review" that takes three days, a "manual audit" of every fifth withdrawal, a term stating you may request one withdrawal at a time and no other until the first is authorised. Each sounds like prudence. Together they are a float.

This is not speculation, and the Commission has now priced it. On 21 October 2026 it announced that an operator, which runs seven websites, would pay £900,000 in a regulatory settlement for failures including unnecessarily delaying consumer withdrawals. The withdrawal-specific findings were a term restricting customers to one withdrawal at a time, which was found unfair under the Consumer Rights Act 2015, and manual review of every fifth or tenth withdrawal for some customers that led to extra information being demanded before payouts were processed. That company held a British licence, which is why the finding exists at all. An unlicensed site answers to no one with that kind of reach.

Against that, the licensed baseline is genuinely fast. Commission data covering June to September 2024 records 44.2 million withdrawals by customers of large online operators: 96.3 per cent cleared automatically, 3.5 per cent cleared within 24 hours, and 0.1 per cent took up to 48 hours. Earlier data from some of the largest firms showed around 99 per cent of requests approved, processed and fulfilled within 24 to 48 hours. That is the standard of comparison a non gamstop casino site invites and almost never meets.

Even so, consumers are not serene about it. Research published on 23 July 2026 found 49 per cent of people who had gambled in the past 12 months agreed that it is quick and easy to withdraw winnings, 33 per cent were neutral and 18 per cent disagreed. The Commission's Contact Centre takes over 6,000 calls a year, and withdrawal problems have long been the number one consumer topic — around 2,000 complaints a year by July 2024, falling from 2,416 in the year to December 2022 to 1,791 in the year to December 2025. The regulator's language is unusually direct: it is not acceptable to introduce friction when a customer tries to withdraw rather than when they deposit, and there is no valid reason to delay a payout where the operator has no regulatory concerns.

Some delay is lawful and nobody's fault. Where an operator suspects money laundering it must file a Suspicious Activity Report and obtain a defence from the National Crime Agency before moving funds, and that obligation can genuinely hold a payment up. The Commission's point is that this does not give an operator the right to confiscate a deposit, and that not every "compliance review" is a money-laundering investigation.

There is one more component of delay worth naming, because it is where offshore terms are most creative: the bonus. Under Social Responsibility Code 5.1.1, in force since 19 January 2026, British licensees may not apply wagering requirements of more than ten times bonus funds, and may not include more than one type of gambling product within a single incentive — so "bet £5 to get 20 free spins" is out, while "bet £5 and get £10 free bet" is in. The Commission's own reasoning for the cap is refreshingly unromantic: it judged the limit would "take out extreme levels as some licensees currently apply up to 60 times wagering requirements". Offshore terms sit in the old world, with published multipliers at 25×, 35× to 50× and higher, and cashout caps such as one operator's 300 per cent of the credited bonus. No British cap applies to a site with no British licence. Thirty-five times a bonus is not a payout delay; it is a payout that mostly never arrives.

The Exclusion Term

Strip away the licence badges and the bonus arithmetic and one clause decides everything about a non gamstop site: what happens to a person the national scheme has already blocked. Everything else — payments, bonuses, verification — is ordinary consumer friction. This is the part that is not.

The mechanics are simple and severe. Registering with Gamstop Online excludes a person from gambling with every online gambling company licensed in Great Britain for a chosen period of 6 months, 1 year, 5 years, or 5 years with auto-renewal. Registration is free and takes a few minutes, though the block can take up to 24 hours to bite. Once registered, the exclusion cannot be cancelled or deactivated during the term, and it stays in place after the term ends unless the person contacts GamStop to remove it. Under the terms of use, auto-renewal may only be switched off during the last six months of a five-year minimum period, and auto-renewal itself continues for up to four further five-year periods. If nobody deactivates, GamStop holds the data through a further automatic seven-year self-exclusion period during which operators are told the person was previously excluded. The group's 2025 annual report devotes a section to its refusal to remove registrations early.

That is a hard system and it works because of a licence condition. Since 31 March 2020 all online operators must be part of GAMSTOP as a condition of their Commission licence, sitting in social responsibility code provision 3.5.5 of the Licence Conditions and Codes of Practice: "Licensees must participate in the national multi-operator self-exclusion scheme." In April 2020 the Commission added a requirement to check the entire customer base against the register at least every 24 hours, which also stopped registered people receiving direct marketing. On 3 April 2020 it suspended the licences of two operators for failing to integrate by the deadline. The rule has teeth, and it has been used.

An offshore site sits entirely outside that, and here is where the "way round it" story collapses. The Commission issued an industry warning notice on 20 January 2025 about casino games supplied by licensed operators appearing on unlicensed websites available to British consumers, noting that such sites often target customers who have self-excluded via GAMSTOP and may have inadequate social responsibility and anti-money-laundering controls. In other words, the regulator's own description of the unlicensed sector's business model is: find the excluded. That is not a loophole. It is a customer-acquisition strategy aimed at a group the evidence identifies as vulnerable — and the same Commission 2026 risk assessment rates remote casinos as high risk for money laundering, with gross gambling yield of £5.0 billion in the year to March 2025, £4.2 billion of it from slots.

There is a quieter danger in the plumbing. The Commission's blog of 12 August 2026 warns that onboarding a customer using a middle name instead of a forename can create mismatches with records held elsewhere, including GAMSTOP, undermining the effectiveness of self-exclusion. A person who genuinely wants the block to hold can be let down by a data-entry slip on a licensed site. On an unlicensed one, there is no record to mismatch with in the first place.

Kahnawà:ke, to its credit, does self-exclusion properly, though not in the direction the affiliates advertise: its rules state that its own voluntary self-exclusion is permanent and irrevocable, and a player who breaches a self-exclusion prohibition forfeits funds deposited or won to a third-party charity chosen by the Commission. Meanwhile the land-based schemes show what a real term looks like: SENSE's minimum is six months, extendable to twelve, with removal only in person at a casino during a six-month "Thinking" period and a 24-hour cooling-off after; Gamstop Betting Shops is a fixed twelve-month term that cannot be ended early, with a 24-hour cooling-off if the customer returns.

And the practical point, stated plainly: no offshore site can undo a GamStop registration. The exclusion holds for its full term and then stays in place until the person contacts GamStop to remove it. Using a non gamstop site does not cancel it, shorten it or hide it. It only means gambling while the block is live, on a website with no obligation to spot the mismatch and no British regulator watching the outcome.

Five Signs a Non GamStop Operator Can Be Trusted

An unlicensed site cannot be made safe by a checklist, only less reckless. These five signs separate the operators that at least answer to a real authority from the ones that answer to nobody, and each comes with a check anyone can perform in a few minutes.

A Certificate of Operation That Names the Domain You Are On

The check is mechanical: click the CGA seal and confirm the certificate behind it shows the same domain name as the site in the address bar. Curaçao's rules state that a mismatch means the site is displaying another operator's certificate and should be treated as unauthorised or fraudulent, and that clicking the seal must redirect to cert.cga.cw. Anjouan's framework similarly requires a unique licence number and a QR code linking to its public register. A certificate that will not verify is not evidence of anything except brass neck.

A Register Entry That Still Exists Today

Licences lapse and permits get pulled. The Kahnawà:ke Gaming Commission suspended a Client Provider Authorization on 29 September 2026; an aggregator reading the Curaçao public register on 6 November 2026 counted 704 licences held by 698 operators, of which only 552 were active. Checking a register once is not checking it. The date on the entry matters more than the badge on the homepage, and a screenshot from last year proves nothing.

A Named ADR Provider in the Player Terms

Where a dispute goes when the operator says no is the whole question. Anjouan requires licensees to designate an authority-approved ADR provider and list its details in player-facing terms, with complaints expected to be resolved within 30 days before escalation; its approved list is EGIS ADR, Axion ADR, iGaming ADR and an approved third party. For contrast, the Commission's approved list includes IBAS and eCOGRA, both free to consumers, and eCOGRA's report for 1 October 2024 to 30 September 2025 recorded 150 valid "Deposits & Withdrawals" disputes out of 911 received, an average domestic resolution time of 31 days, and 17.8 per cent of completed disputes decided in the consumer's favour. A site with no named ADR in its terms is telling you where the buck stops: nowhere.

Segregated Player Funds With a Stated Rating

British licensees must choose one of three customer-funds protection ratings — "not protected", "medium protection" or "high protection" — and disclose it, with "not protected" operators reminding customers every six months. Anjouan's standards require operators to segregate player funds from operational funds, to use independently certified random number generators and to run AML and age verification. All of that is a floor, not a guarantee: even a separate client account does not mean money comes back if the operator becomes insolvent, and gambling businesses are legally allowed to hold customer funds in overseas accounts.

Terms Written by Someone Who Expects to Be Read

Look for the clauses that cost the operator money. A maximum cashout — one operator's terms cap withdrawals from bonus winnings at 300 per cent of the credited bonus, voiding the excess — is a warning. A max-bet-while-wagering rule that voids winnings if breached is a second. Wage abuse clauses that reserve sole discretion for the operator are the third, and British guidance is explicit that terms should specify prohibited patterns of play rather than leave the operator to decide when play breaches them. On 3 July 2025 a Commission licensee was fined £170,000 for failures including a bonus term giving it "the right at their own discretion to close accounts or forfeit winnings". If a term only ever works in one direction, that direction is not yours.

How to Check a Non GamStop Site Before Trusting It With Anything

Six steps, in order. None of them requires a deposit, an account or anything clever.

1. Identify the licence and the licensing body by name. Not "licensed and regulated" in the footer, but a jurisdiction and an authority. Then find that authority's own register — Curaçao's, Anjouan's, the MGA's, Kahnawà:ke's — and search for the operator and the exact domain. Reason: the footer claim is marketing, and the register is the only statement that carries consequences if it is wrong.
2. Click the seal and check what the certificate says. Confirm the certificate names the domain you are actually on, and that the seal redirects to cert.cga.cw if it is a Curaçao Certificate of Operation. Reason: a certificate belonging to another operator is the single most common forgery, and Curaçao's own policy tells you to treat it as fraudulent.
3. Read the withdrawal term before the bonus term. Find the clause on withdrawal limits, processing times and identity documents, ideally as a first-time reader with no account open. Reason: withdrawal terms are where delay is built in deliberately, and the Commission's finding against L & L Europe over a one-withdrawal-at-a-time clause shows what unfair looks like in writing.
4. Calculate the wagering requirement yourself, in pounds. Take the bonus amount, multiply by the published multiplier, and divide by the maximum bet permitted while wagering. Reason: a 35× multiplier at a £5 max bet is a long evening, and no British ten-times cap applies offshore, so the arithmetic is the only protection.
5. Look for the maximum cashout and the max bet rule. Both should be in the bonus or promotion terms; if they are buried in a general terms page or absent entirely, assume the worst. Reason: a cashout cap converts a win into a smaller payment, and a max bet breach can void the whole balance — one operator's terms say so outright.
6. Confirm where an unresolved dispute goes, and write down the ADR name. Check the provider appears on the regulator's approved list for that jurisdiction. Reason: if a complaint ends at the operator, the disagreement is over; where an ADR provider named in the terms takes complaints, there is at least a process with a clock on it.

Judging Claims About Non GamStop Sites

"Best non gamstop sites" is an advertisement dressed as a review, and it is worth saying so. The phrases that dominate this sector — best non gamstop site, best non gamstop sites uk, uk non gamstop sites — nearly all lead to affiliate pages paid per depositing player, which is why they read alike. The word "best" is doing commercial work, not editorial work.

So judge by method rather than brand, since brands are exactly what these lists sell. A licence that verifies on the regulator's own register beats a licence that verifies only on the site's homepage. A 10× wagering cap that applies by law beats a 35× cap that applies by choice. A withdrawal term with no cashout cap beats one with a 300 per cent ceiling. A named ADR provider beats silence. Written evidence of segregated funds beats a padlock icon in the footer.

What remains genuinely uncertain is how far the enforcement numbers will move. Website referrals to search engines jumped from 124 in a quarter to 1,835 in July to September 2026, and the Commission's own estimate of time spent on illegal sites by British consumers has swung from 306 million minutes in January 2025 to 116 million in June and 152 million in July. The Commission states that the unlicensed sector targets customers who have self-excluded. H2's estimate of £16.6 billion staked illegally in 2025 says the practice is growing even as the disruption intensifies. I do not think the answer to that contradiction is that offshore sites have become kinder.

There is one market segment where the non gamstop question bites hardest, and it barely gets a mention in the round-ups. Non gamstop bingo sites and non gamstop poker sites are thinner markets than casino or sportsbook, which means fewer operators and less scrutiny, and non gamstop slot sites are where the largest sums move: slots generated £4.2 billion of the remote casino sector's £5.0 billion gross gambling yield in the year to March 2025. Non gamstop roulette sites are in a category — table games — that British stake limits do not touch, since the £5 and £2 caps apply to online slots only. A player looking for any safe non gamstop site should know that "safe" is not a category any regulator uses. There is a jurisdiction, a register entry and a set of terms, and that is all there is.

Payments deserve one blunt note too, because the search terms say a lot. A non gamstop casino site with PayPal is unlikely: PayPal is a payment service provider within the Payment Services Regulations 2017, and the MGA maintains a list of unauthorised URLs precisely because operators borrow credibility they do not have. Bank gambling blocks cover online casinos, betting sites, gaming apps and physical venues, are applied at card level and so must be enabled on each card, and carry a 48-hour or 72-hour cooling-off before gambling transactions are allowed again. The banks offering one, per the Commission's list last updated 16 October 2026, include Bank of Scotland, Barclays, Halifax, HSBC, Lloyds, MBNA, Monzo, NatWest, Royal Bank of Scotland, Santander and Starling. In Wales the National Gambling Helpline is reached on 0808 2819 265, alongside 0808 8020 133 for England and Scotland.

Common Questions About Non GamStop Sites

Are non GamStop sites legal?

Running one is not. Section 33 of the Gambling Act 2005 makes it an offence for a person to provide facilities for gambling without an operating licence, and the Commission states plainly that it is illegal to offer commercial gambling services to British consumers without a Commission licence, including where the operator holds a licence in another jurisdiction. On summary conviction the offence carries up to 51 weeks' imprisonment, a fine at level 5, or both. For the player, the exposure is not the offence but the absence of everything that comes with licensing.

Are non GamStop sites uk-based?

No. A site advertising to British players without a Commission licence is by definition offshore, because a British licence obliges it to join Gamstop Online under social responsibility code 3.5.5 and to check its whole customer base against the register at least every 24 hours. The common addresses are Curaçao, Anjouan, Kahnawà:ke, Malta and Costa Rica. Some are regulated jurisdictions, one of them does not issue gambling licences at all, and none of them is Great Britain.

Can you get round a GamStop exclusion with a non GamStop site?

The exclusion itself cannot be undone from outside GamStop. It holds for its full term and then stays in place until the person contacts GamStop to remove it; registration cannot be cancelled during the term, and if nobody deactivates it, the data is held through a further automatic seven-year self-exclusion period. What an offshore site can do is take bets from someone the block covers, which is not the same as lifting the block — and the Commission says such sites often target exactly those customers.

What can the Gambling Commission actually do about unlicensed sites?

Disrupt, mostly, rather than prosecute. Since April 2024 the Illegal Markets team issued 3,140 cease and desist and disruption notices, made 774 registrar referrals and 402 host referrals, referred 447,778 search URLs, secured 287,961 removals and reported one prosecution commenced across April 2025 to March 2026. The measured effects are real: registrar blocks and suspensions cut engagement by an average of 91 per cent, GEO IP blocking 60 per cent, Google removal 30 per cent.

Which non GamStop bingo, poker or slot sites come up in searches?

All three, and each has a different risk profile. Bingo and poker offshore markets are thin, which means fewer operators and less independent scrutiny. Slots are where the money is and where the British stake limits do not follow: the £5 per game cycle cap for adults and £2 for 18 to 24-year-olds apply to online slots only, under regulations in force since April and May 2025, and they bind nobody offshore. Roulette and blackjack were never covered by them at all.

Is there any safe non GamStop site?

Any safe unlicensed site is, precisely, one that has stopped selling to Britain, because that is the only state in which it is not breaking section 33. Beyond that, the markers worth checking are a licence that verifies on the regulator's own register today, a named ADR provider in the terms, segregated player funds, no maximum cashout clause and no reserved discretion to void winnings. Those reduce recklessness. They do not create the protection that comes with a Commission licence, or with an exclusion that holds.

The Regulator's Answer to Non GamStop Sites

The honest summary is that non gamstop sites are not an alternative to the British system; they are a market that exists because the British system has an edge, and the edge is enforced by blocking domains, hosts and payments rather than by prosecuting people. The rates at which that enforcement bites — 91 per cent engagement loss from registrar blocks, 60 per cent from GEO IP blocking, 30 per cent from Google removal — are the real story of this niche, and they explain why the same operators keep resurfacing under new addresses.

My judgement, for what it is worth, is that the confident claims deserve the scepticism and the dull mechanics deserve the attention. A certificate that verifies against a live register, a withdrawal term without a cashout cap, a named ADR provider, segregated funds — those are checkable, and they separate a business from a shopfront. The wagering arithmetic is checkable too, and offshore it is still commonly written in the tens.

What no offshore licence can supply is the one protection this topic turns on. A Gamstop Online exclusion holds for its full term and then stays in place until the person contacts GamStop to remove it, and the Commission's warning notice of 20 January 2025 said in terms that unlicensed sites often target the people it covers. Meanwhile the disruption ledger does the arithmetic for itself: 1,835 websites referred to search engines in a single quarter, 546 cease and desist notices, and one prosecution commenced in an entire year.

If gambling is causing harm, the National Gambling Helpline is free on 0808 8020 133, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, and Wales has 0808 2819 265.