GamStop is not optional. Since 31 March 2020, participation in the scheme has been a mandatory condition of holding a remote operating licence from the Gambling Commission. It is run by The National Online Self Exclusion Scheme Limited, a not-for-profit funded by the gambling industry, and by the end of 2025 more than half a million people had registered with the scheme.
A licence condition, not a courtesy
The mechanism is straightforward, and that is precisely why failures are so difficult for operators to defend. When you register with GamStop, every operator licensed by the Gambling Commission is required to check the register before letting someone open or use an account. Each one must then take all reasonable steps to prevent you from opening a new account or using an existing one for the full duration of the exclusion period you chose.
This is not a courtesy. It is a licence condition.
Behind the scenes, GamStop runs a real-time service that licensed operators integrate directly into their registration and login systems. When someone tries to open an account, the operator’s system queries the GamStop database before access is granted. For existing accounts, operators are required to have procedures that prevent anyone who has since self-excluded from continuing to gamble. The infrastructure to stop a self-excluded person gambling already exists inside every compliant operator’s platform.
So when a self-excluded player is still able to deposit and lose money on a UK-licensed site, the question is not whether something went wrong. It is why the operator’s mandatory controls did not do what the law requires.
The regulator acts on these failings
The regulator has shown it will act. Between May and December 2025 alone, the Gambling Commission took regulatory action against more than a dozen gambling operators for failings spanning anti-money laundering, social responsibility, and technical obligations. The penalties were not nominal: in this period the Commission imposed a £10 million penalty on Platinum Gaming, the Unibet operator (22 October 2025), a £650,000 settlement with NetBet (5 November 2025), a £650,000 fine on Videoslots (20 November 2025), and a £2 million settlement with Paddy Power Betfair (17 December 2025).
These figures matter because they establish a pattern the Commission itself recognises: operators do get safer-gambling and anti-money-laundering controls wrong, and there are consequences when they do. The Commission sets its penalties with reference to the scale of an operator’s business, so for larger operators the sums involved can be substantial.
Where GamStop ends
There is, however, an important boundary to understand. GamStop covers operators licensed by the Gambling Commission. It does not reach sites that operate without a Commission licence, wherever else they may be licensed. A casino licensed only offshore, in a jurisdiction such as Curaçao, falls outside GamStop’s remit entirely, which means a GamStop registration does nothing to block it. These operators often apply different identity-verification thresholds and different dispute-resolution processes from those a Commission licence demands. For a player who self-excluded in good faith and then found themselves gambling on an offshore site, this distinction is usually the heart of the matter.
What this means for your case
That is the work we do: examining what protections applied to your situation, which operator the losses sat with, and whether the controls that should have been in place were. Every case turns on its own facts and its own evidence.
Sources
- Gambling Commission, enforcement action (gamblingcommission.gov.uk).
- GamStop (gamstop.co.uk).
General information, not legal advice. Clinton & Co Advisors is a trading name of Ramays TA/Clinton and Co Limited. We are not solicitors or a law firm. We connect clients with regulated legal partners.