GamStop and self-exclusion.
How Britain's self-exclusion schemes work, and your options when an operator lets you bet anyway.
What this collection covers.
Self-exclusion is the strongest formal step a player can take against gambling harm, and GamStop is the scheme that carries it across every casino and bookmaker licensed in Great Britain. One free registration is supposed to close every British-licensed account and block every new one for the period you choose. These guides explain how that promise is meant to work in practice, and what your options are when it does not.
The guides in this hub fall into three groups. The first covers the schemes themselves: what GamStop actually is, how it differs from an operator's own self-exclusion tools, how to register step by step, and how blocking software such as BetBlocker adds a second layer of protection at device level. The second group covers failures: operators that let a self-excluded player open an account, sites that kept marketing to someone who had asked to be excluded, and the compensation questions that follow from both. The third group looks at the offshore problem, because casinos licensed in Curaçao and other overseas jurisdictions sit outside GamStop entirely, and players are rarely told that before they deposit.
A failure of self-exclusion is not a dead end. A British-licensed operator that took bets from a GamStop-registered player has a serious case to answer, and the Gambling Commission's rules on the point are unambiguous. Even against offshore sites, the realistic picture depends on the facts of your account history rather than on whatever the casino's support team says. Start with the guide closest to your situation, and if you would rather talk it through first, our team reviews self-exclusion cases without charge.