French gambling regulator blocks crypto betting platform
The ANJ says Polymarket.com was illegally offering online gambling in France.
France.- The French regulator l’Autorité Nationale des Jeux (ANJ) continues its efforts to tackle unlicensed online gambling in the country. It says it has managed to geo-block Polymarket.com, a cryptocurrency-based prediction betting platform.
The regulator said that it monitored Polymarket.com over the last month and found that some types of gambling offered by the platform was probably illegal under French law. The offering, which is operated by Panama-licensed Adventure One QSS, included online slots, which remain unregulated in France.
The ANJ said it contacted Adventure One QSS in late November and that the operator agreed to use geoblocking to prevent access from France. This was reportedly applied from November 21. The ANJ said that any French players affected who can no longer access their accounts should contact the operator.
In 2022, Polymarket was fined $1.4m by the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission for failing to register. Its trading was suspended for a time.
Online casino gaming remains unregulated in France, but the government is keen to change that. It hoped to regulate the vertical as soon as early 2025 in order to plug a hole in government revenues, but concerns from land-based casinos have led the plans to be suspended. The government has instead launched a six-month consultation process via three working groups to take more feedback from stakeholders before deciding how to advance.
The first working group will be led by the Ministry of Health and will meet tomorrow (December 3) to address the issue of gambling addiction and problem gambling measures. Subsequent groups will focus on consumer protections and the contentious issue of the possible economic impact on land-based casinos. Land-based casinos want to be given a period of exclusivity if the vertical is legalised.
For now, the ANJ has a blacklist of close to 950 URLs that have been blocked for offering gambling without a licence, including many offering online casino. Offering illegal forms of gambling can also be punished with jail in France – up to seven years in the case of organised offerings, plays a fine of up to €200,000.
The ANJ has undertaken awareness-raising campaigns in a bid to inform the public that the vertical remain illegal. “The ANJ would like to warn people who play on illegal sites because they are exposing themselves to particularly serious risks,” it said in the latest update. “These include the non-payment of winnings, payment method fraud, identity theft and installation of malicious computer programmes.”
