New Casinos Not on GamStop and What Offshore Licences Cover in 2026

A new casino not on GamStop holds a licence from a regulator outside Great Britain, so the scheme cannot block it. That cuts both ways. The offers are often looser than British ones — wagering requirements well above the ten-times cap in force here — and so is the protection: no UK licence means no Gambling Commission behind the terms.

The phrase "new casinos not on GamStop" bundles two quite different things together, and the trade has been happy to let them blur. One is newness — a fresh site, new games, a welcome offer. The other is the licensing gap. Only the second one decides what happens when a withdrawal is refused or an account is closed with money in it.

GamStop Online is the national online self-exclusion scheme, run by The National Online Self Exclusion Scheme Limited. It is often typed "gamestop", which is a misspelling and not the scheme's name. Since 31 March 2020 every online operator licensed by the Gambling Commission has had to be part of it, under social responsibility code provision 3.5.5 of the Licence Conditions and Codes of Practice. A site that does not appear in that scheme is, almost by definition, not operating under a British licence.

That is the whole subject. The offshore market is real, it is legal to use in the sense that no adult consumer commits an offence by playing, and it is policed unevenly. Over the monitored period from May 2024 to July 2025, just over 1,000 unique illegal gambling websites were accessed by consumers in Great Britain. Some of those were sites with a foreign licence and no British one; others had no meaningful licence at all. Telling them apart takes about ten minutes of reading, and this page is about which ten minutes.

A note on the numbers. GamStop Online reported 614,738 consumers on the register as of July 2026, and more than one in two of them had opted for the maximum five-year exclusion. Whatever the offshore trade says about that figure, it describes people who have made a decision and are entitled to have it hold. Self-exclusion runs for its full chosen term and then stays in place until the person contacts GamStop to remove it. No site, offshore or otherwise, is a way round that.

As of 13.11.2026, the gap between the two regimes is wider than it has been for years, because the British rules tightened twice in 2025 and 2026 while the offshore ones did not move at all.

New Casino Not on GamStop Licensing Explained

A licence is not a badge. It is a set of obligations with a named authority behind them, and the useful question is what that authority can do when something goes wrong.

Malta is the reference point most people know. The Malta Gaming Authority requires a B2C Gaming Service Licence for an entity offering gaming from Malta, to a Maltese person or through a Maltese legal entity, charging a one-time non-refundable application fee of €5,000 and a fixed annual licence fee of €25,000, plus 5 per cent gaming tax on revenue from the service. Minimum issued and paid-up share capital is €100,000 for Type 1 and Type 2 B2C licences. That is a real regulator with a real register, and it also publishes a list of Unauthorised URLs — domains it says have no connection to it, where any reference to Maltese licensing is false and misleading, with entries carrying notice dates of 30 October 2026.

Curaçao has been in the middle of the largest overhaul in its history. The National Ordinance on Games of Chance, the LOK, took effect on 24 December 2024 and made the Curaçao Gaming Authority the direct licensing and supervisory authority, ending the old master-licence and sub-licence model. The legacy "orange" sub-licence certificates of operation ended on 15 October 2025, and the CGA is explicit that a historic /JAZ number or legacy seal must not be treated as proof that an operator currently holds a valid licence. Licensing activity ceased for the four former master licensors on staggered dates: Gaming Curaçao on 18 August 2024, Curaçao eGaming on 1 October 2024, Antillephone on 1 November 2024 and Curaçao Interactive Licensing on 31 January 2025. Provisional licences granted by operation of law ran to 24 June 2025, were extended to 24 December 2025, and supplier registration becomes fully mandatory in Curaçao from 24 December 2026. A Curaçao seal is now checkable: clicking a Certificate of Operation Seal must redirect to cert.cga.cw, and if the certificate behind it names a different domain from the one being viewed, the site is displaying somebody else's paperwork.

Anjouan issues B2C and B2B Internet Gaming Licences at €17,828 for issuance and the same for annual renewal, with €500 per additional domain. The authority says its certificates carry a unique licence number and a QR code linking to a public register, and that a certificate which cannot be verified there should not be relied on. It also states, in a June 2026 statement, that an Anjouan licence "is not, and has never been presented as, a universal authorisation to operate in every country in the world". That is a regulator saying, plainly, that it does not guarantee anything about British law. Worth remembering when a site's marketing implies otherwise. 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 €17,000 each per year, and that Comoros financial intelligence officials described Anjouan Corporate Services as operating illegally — a dispute the authority rejects.

Kahnawà:ke has regulated interactive gaming since 1999 and requires licence holders to be hosted at Mohawk Internet Technologies in the Mohawk Territory. It issues one Interactive Gaming Licence — held by that data centre since 1999 — and Client Provider Authorizations to the operators who actually face players. Its fees rise on 1 January 2027: the CPA application fee goes from USD 35,000 to USD 40,000 and the five-year renewal from USD 5,000 plus the annual fee to USD 40,000 including it.

And then there is the bottom of the market. Costa Rica operates no comprehensive gambling licensing regime; the "data processing license" sometimes quoted in the trade is not a licence in the legal sense, and a bill that would have created a mandatory regime, No. 25,057, was rejected in early 2026. A site advertising Costa Rican registration is advertising nothing.

New Casino Sites Not on GamStop and Where Terms Diverge

The clearest way to see the difference is to line up what each regime requires. Not brand against brand — rule against rule.

Two rows deserve a longer look. The 10× cap is not a piece of consumer frippery: when the Commission consulted, it chose a cap over an outright ban and said the limit "will take out extreme levels as some licensees currently apply up to 60 times wagering requirements". Offshore, the same arithmetic survives untouched. And the maximum cashout clause is the quiet one — a term that lets a site void everything above 300 per cent of the bonus is a term that can wipe out a genuinely good run.

Why the Term UK Casino is a Warning

The phrase "new UK casinos not on GamStop" contains a contradiction, and it is worth being blunt about it. A casino offering gambling to consumers in Great Britain needs a Gambling Commission licence. Section 33 of the Gambling Act 2005 makes it an offence to provide facilities for gambling without an operating licence, on summary conviction carrying up to 51 weeks' imprisonment, a fine at level 5 or both — six months in Scotland. The provision applies to remote gambling if at least one piece of remote gambling equipment used is in Great Britain, or, under the wording amended in 2014, if the provider knows or should know the facilities are likely to be used in Great Britain. The Commission's own statement is unambiguous: it is illegal to offer commercial gambling services to consumers in Great Britain without a Commission licence, and that includes operators holding a licence in another jurisdiction.

That offence attaches to the operator, not the player. Adult consumers who gamble on an unlicensed site are not committing the section 33 offence; the Act's general gambling offences are drafted against those who provide facilities. Which is why the risk offshore is not arrest. It is that when something goes wrong, there is no British regulator with a lever, no licence to suspend, and no route through a dispute body operating under British rules.

The enforcement picture explains why that matters. Since April 2024 the Commission's Illegal Markets team has issued 3,140 cease and desist and disruption notices, referred 447,778 Bing and Google URLs and secured 287,961 URL removals. Across 160 illegal gambling websites for which traffic data existed, engagement fell by an average of 32 per cent after disruption. By method, registrar blocks and website suspensions produced the largest average fall at 91 per cent each, ahead of GEO IP blocking at 60 per cent, Bing removal at 52 per cent and Google removal at 30 per cent. The Commission's own conclusion is that search-engine removal makes a site harder to find but does not block access — so a site can vanish from page one and still be there for anyone with the address.

There is one more enforcement detail I would put in front of anyone weighing a brand-new offshore domain. Across April 2025 to March 2026, every quarter recorded zero or one prosecutions commenced — one in total, in the October to December 2025 quarter. Disruption is not prosecution, and the two are moving at very different speeds.

The Online Casino Licence Test

This is the single thing the whole topic turns on. Everything else — payout speed, bonus terms, how polished the site looks — is downstream of whether there is a real regulator with a real register.

How it works the first time. A new player meets the licence question in one of two shapes. On a Gambling Commission-licensed site, the operator checks the customer against the register before accepting the account, and under the April 2020 requirement must check its entire customer base at least every 24 hours; the whole population was checked within a day of sign-up becoming possible. Identity verification sits alongside that, and since 7 May 2019 licence condition 17 has required information establishing identity to be obtained and verified before the customer is permitted to gamble. The Commission's expectation, restated in an August 2026 blog, is that identity and age checks come before a deposit or a stake, and that onboarding on initials, nicknames or a commercial address is not good enough.

How it works later. The offshore version runs the other way round. A licence in Curaçao or Anjouan is verified by a seal or a QR code pointing at a register — if the operator has set that up properly. There is no shared database behind it, no equivalent of the 24-hour base check, and no obligation to hold a British player to British rules. The British scheme's own limit is worth stating plainly too: GamStop Online blocks access to gambling websites and apps licensed in Great Britain only, and cannot prevent access to services run by organisations that do not participate. Offshore sites that hold no Commission licence are not connected to the scheme — a point stated by trade and press sources rather than on a regulator page, though it is consistent with GamStop's own terms of use.

Warning signs. A seal that does not redirect to a verification page. A certificate naming a different domain from the one in the address bar. A /JAZ number presented as a current Curaçao licence after the 15 October 2025 end of the orange certificates. A footer that names a jurisdiction with no licensing regime at all. A licence claim with no register, no number and no way to check it — which is not a licence claim, it is a design choice.

Five Signs a New Offshore Site Can Be Trusted

Each of these takes minutes. None of them requires depositing anything.

The licence is checkable, by number, on the regulator's own register

Take the licence number or seal from the site's footer and open the regulator's register yourself, typing the address rather than clicking through. For Curaçao, a Certificate of Operation Seal must redirect to cert.cga.cw, and the certificate behind it must name the same domain you are viewing. For Anjouan, the certificate's unique number and QR code must resolve in the public register. A licence that cannot be found on a register is a claim, not a licence — the CGA and Anjouan Gaming both say so in their own published policies.

The terms name a maximum cashout figure, or do not have one at all

Read the bonus terms and search for the word "maximum". A published offshore term capping bonus-derived winnings at 300 per cent of the credited bonus, with the excess voided, is a term that can remove a good result. Under British rules no operator may impose a maximum limit on what a consumer withdraws from their deposit balance. If the cap is there, it should be in the same type size as the bonus headline, not buried three clicks in.

The maximum bet while wagering is stated in plain numbers

A published term setting the maximum bet while wagering a bonus at €5 per bet for regular players and €10 for VIP players, with any bet above the limit rejected, is at least honest about itself. So is a rule that the casino maximum bet is 20 per cent of the deposited amount. The warning sign is not the cap — it is a cap that appears only in the enforcement clause, where breaching it can mean account closure and forfeiture of the bonus and everything won while wagering it.

The dispute route leads to a named, independent adjudicator

Under British rules, licence condition 6.1.1 requires arrangements to refer a dispute to an ADR entity free of charge if it is not resolved within eight weeks. Offshore, Anjouan requires licensees to designate an authority-approved ADR provider and list its name and contact details in player-facing terms, expecting complaints to be resolved within 30 days before escalation; the providers currently approved are EGIS ADR, Axion ADR, iGaming ADR and an approved ADR firm. If the terms route disputes to the operator's own support team and stop there, the ladder has no top rung.

Customer funds and payout terms are described before the first deposit

Look for a statement about what happens to money held on account if the business fails. British operators must pick one of three ratings — not protected, medium protection or high protection — say which applies in their terms, and an operator rated "not protected" must remind the customer every six months. Keeping funds in a separate client account does not guarantee return on insolvency, and operators are legally allowed to hold customer money in overseas bank accounts. An offshore site with nothing to say on the subject has said something.

How to Judge a New Offshore Casino

Six steps, in this order. Each one exists to remove a specific risk rather than to fill a form.

1. Confirm the regulator before you read the offer. Open the register named in the footer and find the licence number or domain. Reason: the offer is irrelevant if the licence behind it is expired, legacy or unverifiable, and a Curaçao /JAZ number stopped being proof on 15 October 2025.
2. Check the exclusion position, and be honest about it. GamStop Online registrations cannot be removed early, and a registration that has run its term stays in place until the person contacts GamStop. Reason: an offshore site does not lift an exclusion, and building a habit on that assumption risks a temporary decision becoming a permanent one.
3. Read the bonus terms end to end, including the enforcement clause. Look for the wagering multiple, the maximum cashout and the maximum bet while wagering. Reason: a 25× requirement is a 25× requirement, and a 300 per cent cashout cap is the term most likely to matter at the worst possible moment.
4. Find the payout route and the identity-check timing. Read what documents are asked for, and when. Reason: a quarter of the complaints reaching the Commission's contact centre concern identity verification, and the complaint is nearly always about documents requested for the first time at withdrawal. Under British rules a withdrawal request must not trigger a demand for information the licensee could reasonably have requested earlier — offshore, that protection does not exist.
5. Set limits and payment controls on your side. Ask the bank whether it offers a gambling block; the Commission's list of banks providing one, last updated 16 October 2026, names Bank of Scotland, Barclays, Halifax, HSBC, Lloyds Bank, MBNA, Monzo, NatWest, Royal Bank of Scotland, Santander and Starling. Reason: blocks are applied at card level, so they must be activated on each card, and most banks use a 48-hour or 72-hour cooling-off period before gambling transactions are allowed again.
6. Install blocking software before you need it. GamStop signposts Gamban and BetBlocker as tools for phones, tablets and computers; BetBlocker says it blocks over 1,368,000 gambling websites and 3,100 apps, requires no registration and is free worldwide. Reason: after the free UK licence scheme for Gamban ended on 31 March 2026 it costs £4.99 a month or £29.99 a year in England and Scotland, and is free in Wales — a small price for something designed to be difficult to remove.

Questions About Payouts at New Casinos

If one number decides whether an offshore site is worth the bother, it is how often the money actually arrives. The Commission's data covering June to September 2024 records 44.2 million withdrawals by customers of large online operators, of which 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 withdrawal requests approved, processed and fulfilled within 24 to 48 hours.

Those figures come with an argument attached, and the Commission has made it repeatedly. It states it is not acceptable for operators to introduce friction when a customer tries to withdraw rather than when they deposit, or to place commercial interests above the customer's, and that where an operator has no regulatory concerns there is no valid reason to delay a payout. The complaint volume shows the gap between the principle and the practice: complaints coded "Withdrawals and/or financial transactions" fell from 2,416 in the year to December 2022 to 1,791 in the year to December 2025, while the Commission's Annual Report and Accounts 2024-25 still records withdrawals as the cause of most of the complaints it receives.

The rules on the British side of the line are specific. Reverse withdrawals have been banned outright since 31 October 2021 under RTS 14B — consumers must not be given the option to cancel a withdrawal request — because the function tempted engaged players to carry on. Licence condition 17.1.1 stops a withdrawal request triggering a document demand the licensee could reasonably have made earlier. Terms that let an operator void or withhold winnings at its sole discretion are treated as unfair under the Consumer Rights Act 2015. And there is no fixed statutory deadline for a payout at all: the regime relies on fair and open terms, the identity condition and the unfair-terms prohibition rather than a stated number of days.

Enforcement follows. In October 2026 an operator running seven websites agreed a £900,000 regulatory settlement for failures including unnecessarily delaying consumer withdrawals — a term limiting customers to one withdrawal at a time, held unfair under the Consumer Rights Act 2015, and manual review of every fifth or tenth withdrawal that led to extra information being demanded before processing. And for disputes that do reach an adjudicator: eCOGRA's Great Britain report for 1 October 2024 to 30 September 2025 records 911 disputes received, 150 of them valid "Deposits & Withdrawals" cases, an average domestic resolution time of 31 days and 17.8 per cent of completed disputes ruled in the consumer's favour. IBAS, in the same period, completed domestic disputes in an average of 20 days, upheld 65 consumer complaints by written decision and reported 100 per cent operator compliance with decisions in the consumer's favour.

I would read that last statistic twice. Even on the British side, four disputes in five go the operator's way — which is a reason to check the terms before playing rather than after.

New Pay by Phone Casino Payment Methods

Payment method is where the two regimes part company most sharply, and it is not only about speed.

Under licence condition 5.1.2, effective 31 January 2024, British licensees may accept payment from Great Britain customers only through a provider that is a payment service provider within the Payment Services Regulations 2017. The credit card ban has applied since 14 April 2020, and operators must also ensure that money arriving from an e-wallet was not loaded from a credit card. Offshore, that restriction is simply absent, which is the practical reason phone-billing and card routes that are closed to British-licensed sites stay open elsewhere.

The speeds themselves are worth separating from the marketing. On the crypto side, Bitcoin targets a 10-minute average block interval, but a block is not guaranteed within that window: the probability of one arriving within 10 minutes is about 63 per cent, rising to 95 per cent within 30 minutes and 99.7 per cent within 60. Six confirmations — the classic default, chosen on an assumption of an attacker holding under 10 per cent of hashrate — take an hour at that pace, though a payment can be accepted as soon as it is seen when the double-spend risk is negligible. Litecoin targets 2.5-minute blocks, so six confirmations should take around 15 minutes, except that only about 55.43 per cent of modelled six-confirmation spans actually finish inside 15 minutes. Ethereum transfers need exactly 21,000 gas units, and with standard-tier gas at roughly 0.10–0.18 gwei on 3 November 2026 that priced a plain transfer at about $0.005–$0.009 and an ERC-20 transfer at roughly $0.012–$0.023 — cheap, but paid whether the transaction succeeds or fails. A USDT transfer on TRON to a wallet that already holds USDT consumes about 65,000 Energy; to a brand-new wallet about 130,000, which without staked Energy burns roughly 13 TRX and 26 TRX respectively.

On the conventional side, Visa Direct's Fast Funds service processes in real time with funds available within 30 minutes of approval, against the 1–3 business days of a standard bank transfer. Faster Payments carries a £1 million per-transaction scheme maximum, raised from £250,000 on 10 February 2022, though that is a ceiling and not an entitlement — banks set their own lower limits, and over 90 per cent of Faster Payments transactions complete in under two seconds. A personal PayPal UK account pays nothing to withdraw to a bank account when no currency conversion is involved, and nothing to withdraw to a card; a failed transfer because of incorrect details costs 50 pence.

Then the e-wallets, where the fee sits with the wallet rather than the casino. Skrill charges 2.80 per cent of the amount withdrawn to a bank account, minimum €3.50, from 12 January 2026, plus a 4.49 per cent foreign-exchange fee when conversion is needed, and a €5.00 monthly service fee if the account is not used at least once every six months. Neteller charges the same 2.80 per cent with a minimum of $3.50, alongside 12.75 USD for a member wire and 0–7.5 per cent to withdraw to Visa or Mastercard. MiFinity charges 1.8 per cent for crypto withdrawals and €1 for Visa EEA, and goes inactive after 12 months without login at €1 a month. The pattern is the same everywhere: the casino advertises the method, the wallet charges the fee, and nobody mentions it in the welcome offer.

New Casinos Not on GamStop and the Bonus You Are Actually Being Offered

British bonus rules changed on 19 January 2026, and the change is the best available measuring stick for offshore offers.

Social responsibility code 5.1.1 now caps wagering requirements at ten times — the Code defines the requirement as one where a customer must make wagers totalling a particular value for funds to become withdrawable. It also bans mixed-product promotions, including where terms are linked and shared, so "bet £5 and get 20 free spins" is non-compliant while "bet £5 and get a £10 free bet" is fine. The implementation date slipped from 19 December 2025 to 19 January 2026. Alongside that, licence condition 7.1.1 requires terms and practices to be fair, transparent and not misleading; SR code 5.1.9 requires significant conditions of marketing incentives to be shown prominently, and where displayed online, in full no more than one click away. The CMA's do's and don'ts, published in 2018 and still applied, tell operators to let customers exit a promotion at any time with their remaining deposit plus winnings from play with that deposit, and the CMA considers wagering requirements unlikely to be unfair when they attach only to the bonus.

Offshore, none of that applies. Published terms from offshore casinos show casino bonus amounts subject to a 25× playthrough requirement before winnings may be withdrawn, with the multiple expressed against either the bonus alone or the bonus plus the deposit; one operator's wagering contribution chart gives slots and specialty games 100 per cent, table games 20 per cent, video poker and blackjack 10 per cent, roulette and baccarat 5 per cent and craps and live dealer games 0 per cent. Another states that for deposit bonuses the required bet amount is the bonus multiplied by the wager and that "the deposit amount itself is not included in the wagering calculation". Trade coverage describes offshore welcome offers as typically 25× to 40×, with no-deposit bonuses at 40× to 60× and a €50–€100 cashout cap. A 2026 guide's comparison table puts offshore welcome-bonus multipliers at 35× to 50×. The ranges differ because nobody offshore is measuring.

Two structural differences matter more than the multiplier. The first is the cashout cap: a published term reserving the right to limit withdrawable winnings from bonus funds, including free spins and cashback, to 300 per cent of the credited bonus amount, with the excess voided, can turn a winning session into a rounding error. The second is the sticky bonus — a non-cashable bonus usable for wagering but never withdrawable and removed on cashout. British rules dismantled the ground it stood on by requiring that wagering requirements not apply to play with the deposit balance, that deposit and bonus balances always be displayed separately, and that players be allowed to withdraw the deposit balance at any time, including while a bonus is pending or active.

And when it goes wrong, the enforcement route differs too. In July 2025 an operator was fined £170,000 for regulatory failures including a bonus term stating that it had the right at its own discretion to close accounts or forfeit winnings — a term British rules do not permit. Offshore, discretion clauses of exactly that shape are ordinary drafting.

What the Numbers Say About the Offshore Market

The offshore market is not a rumour, and the estimates do not agree with each other. That disagreement is itself informative.

H2 Gambling Capital estimates the amount staked with illegal gambling operators in the UK reached £16.6 billion in 2025, up from about £5 billion in 2019, with the proportion of gambling happening legally falling from 97 per cent to 92 per cent. A Frontier Economics study for the Betting and Gaming Council put black-market online stakes at £2.7 billion a year, equal to 2.1 per cent of the £128 billion staked with British regulated remote casino, betting and bingo operators, involving 1.5 million Brits, with a further £1.6 billion possible in person. Yield Sec and Gaming Compliance International, working for the Campaign for Fairer Gambling, put the British online market at £8.8 billion in gross gambling revenue in 2025, split 91 per cent regulated and 9 per cent unregulated.

When three credible sets of analysts produce £2.7 billion, £8.8 billion and £16.6 billion from the same market, the honest conclusion is that nobody can measure it precisely. The Commission's own October 2024 methodology combines web-traffic data with a licensed-play assumption of £0.32 of gross gambling yield per minute for online slots and states explicitly that it does not capture activity hidden by VPNs. Its more recent survey work, published 5 November 2026 and covering April 2025 to April 2026, estimates that 0.6 per cent of respondents across the whole population engaged with illegal gambling websites in the past four weeks, and that among those who had gambled online in the past four weeks the figure was 2.5 per cent, with a further 1.5 per cent in the past 12 months.

Two things are worth holding together. The illegal market is a minority activity and a large amount of money, and the proportion of it that is genuine offshore casino play rather than unlicensed betting is not something any of these studies separates out. The Illegal Gambling Taskforce's terms of reference, published by DCMS on 13 May 2026, name three priorities: reducing payments to and from illegal operators, tackling online advertising of illegal gambling, and improving cross-agency enforcement. Payment flows, not websites, are where the Commission says the leverage is — its referral of transaction data to the Visa Operator Scheme is described as a critical and still early-stage part of that strategy.

The Help That Applies Whoever Holds the Licence

Support does not depend on which regulator signed the paperwork. It is free and it is available to anyone in Great Britain.

The National Gambling Helpline is operated by GamCare on 0808 8020 133, free of charge, 24 hours a day, every day of the year, and the same number reaches live chat and WhatsApp, the latter on mobile only; callers in Wales are given 0808 2819 265. It is not a crisis line, and staff follow safeguarding procedures rather than transferring callers at immediate risk. BeGambleAware is the public-facing brand of the charity GambleAware and directs people to the same number. Gamblers Anonymous England, Wales and Ulster can be reached on 0330 094 0322 and runs around 250 meeting locations with no appointment needed, and Gam-Anon UK & Ireland supports the family and friends of compulsive gamblers whether or not the gambler attends GA. The NHS National Gambling Clinic at 69 Warwick Road, London SW5 9HB takes self-referrals and professional referrals, and NHS England has opened 15 specialist gambling clinics since 2019, with integrated care boards commissioning eight regional services that now receive almost 5,000 referrals a year. Citizens Advice Scotland runs a gambling support line on 0800 328 1131, Monday to Friday, 10am to 3pm.

The funding behind all of it changed in 2025. The statutory levy commenced on 6 April 2025 and charges 1.1 per cent of previous-year gross gambling yield from all online operators, raising just under £120 million in its first year, ringfenced for research, prevention and treatment and split 50 per cent treatment, 20 per cent research and 30 per cent prevention. From 1 April 2026 NHS England took commissioning responsibility for gambling-harms treatment in England.

One more figure, because it is the one that keeps the subject honest. In the Gambling Commission's third annual Gambling Survey for Great Britain, published 16 July 2026 from 20,775 adults with fieldwork between January 2025 and January 2026, 2.4 per cent of all participants scored 8 or more on the Problem Gambling Severity Index — stable across three years at 2.5 per cent, 2.7 per cent and 2.4 per cent — and 3.4 per cent of those who had gambled in the past 12 months had sought support because of their own gambling.

Frequently Asked Questions About Offshore Casinos

Is it legal to use a casino that is not on GamStop?

Yes for the player, no for the operator. Section 33 of the Gambling Act 2005 makes it an offence to provide facilities for gambling without an operating licence, and the Commission states it is illegal to offer commercial gambling services to consumers in Great Britain without a Commission licence, including where the operator holds a licence elsewhere. The Act's general gambling offences attach to those who provide facilities, not to adult consumers. So the site is breaking the law; the customer is not. What the customer loses is every protection that comes with a British licence.

How do I tell whether a new offshore casino really holds the licence it claims?

Open the regulator's register and find the licence yourself, by number or by domain, typing the address rather than clicking the seal. For Curaçao, a Certificate of Operation Seal must redirect to cert.cga.cw, and the certificate behind it must name the domain you are viewing — a different domain means the site is displaying another operator's paperwork. For Anjouan, you should verify the certificate details on the public register. Both authorities say a seal or number that cannot be verified there should not be relied on.

Are offshore bonus terms really worse than British ones?

Measurably, yes. British rules cap wagering at ten times and ban mixed-product promotions from 19 January 2026. Published offshore terms show 25× playthrough, contribution charts that count roulette at 5 per cent and live dealer games at 0 per cent, a maximum bet of €5 while wagering, and a cashout limit of 300 per cent of the credited bonus with the excess voided. No single term is scandalous. The combination is, because each one narrows the gap between what the headline promises and what can be withdrawn.

Why do offshore sites ask for documents only when I try to withdraw?

Because there is no rule stopping them. British licence condition 17.1.1 states a withdrawal request must not result in a requirement for additional information if the licensee could reasonably have requested it earlier, and the Commission has said delaying a withdrawal over insufficient identity may breach condition 17. A quarter of the complaints reaching its contact centre concern identity verification, and the concern is usually documents demanded at withdrawal rather than at sign-up. Offshore, the timing is a matter of the operator's own commercial judgement.

Do offshore casinos report to GamStop?

No. GamStop Online blocks access to gambling websites and apps licensed in Great Britain and can only exclude from participating operators, so it cannot prevent access to services run by organisations that do not take part. Offshore sites holding no Commission licence are not connected to the scheme — a point stated by trade and press sources rather than on a regulator page, though it is consistent with GamStop's own terms of use. A self-exclusion holds for its full term and then remains until the person contacts GamStop.

How fast are payouts from a new offshore casino?

Faster than the withdrawal terms usually suggest, if the site is honest — and slower in the specific case that matters. Bitcoin blocks average ten minutes but arrive within ten minutes only about 63 per cent of the time, and six confirmations take about an hour; Litecoin's six confirmations should take 15 minutes but complete inside that window only about 55.43 per cent of the time. Visa Direct funds can be available within 30 minutes of approval, and over 90 per cent of Faster Payments transactions settle in under two seconds. The delay to watch is not the network; it is the account review.

The Line Between New and Unlicensed

New is a marketing word; licensed is a legal fact, and only the second one is worth a search. Anyone weighing a brand-new offshore domain should put the licence first and the welcome offer last, because the offer is priced against exactly the protections the licence would have brought: a ten-times wagering cap, no mixed-product promotions, no maximum cashout clause, a free ADR route after eight weeks, and a customer-funds rating that has to be disclosed. Strip those away and the headline number gets larger. That is not generosity, it is arithmetic.

I would also keep two facts in the same pocket. Offshore operators are not prosecuted in any meaningful volume — across April 2025 to March 2026, every quarter recorded zero or one prosecutions commenced — so the market will keep producing new domains regardless of what the regulator says. And the enforcement that does bite is aimed at the plumbing: since April 2024 the Commission has issued 3,140 cease and desist and disruption notices, and registrar blocks and website suspensions each produced an average 91 per cent fall in engagement, the sharpest of any method it measures.

Which leaves one number to close on. GamStop Online reported 614,738 consumers on the register as of July 2026, more than one in two of them on the maximum five-year exclusion. Every one of those is a decision that the scheme holds for its full term and then keeps in place until the person contacts GamStop to remove it. No new domain, however fresh, changes that. If gambling stops being a pastime and starts being a problem, the National Gambling Helpline is free on 0808 8020 133, 24 hours a day.