The Gambling Commission remit ends at the border of UKGC-licensed operators. Offshore sites offering remote gambling to UK customers without a licence commit an offence under the Gambling Act 2005.
UK Gambling Commission · · · gamblingcommission.gov.uk
What this site covers
Six chapters, each opening the topic and linking to the full page.
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Chapter 01
GamStop explained
GamStop is the national multi-operator self-exclusion scheme for online gambling in Great Britain. It is a not-for-profit register run by the National Online Self-Exclusion Scheme Limited, and its purpose is to let a person enrol once and be blocked from every remote gambling site that holds a UK Gambling Commission operating licence.
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Chapter 02
The legal position
The short version of the player position under UK law is that it is not a criminal offence for a UK adult to place a bet with an operator that does not hold a UK Gambling Commission licence. UK gambling law is drafted with the offence sitting on the supply side of the transaction, not the demand side.
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Chapter 03
The risks explained
The UK Gambling Commission's oversight of a licensed operator is not a light-touch audit that visits once a year. It is a constant supervisory presence built on regulatory returns, key events reporting under Licence Condition 15.2, annual assurance statements, periodic thematic reviews, targeted operator inspections, and the public enforcement register that publishes every regulatory settlement and public statement with the operator named.
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Chapter 04
Payments and checks
Every UK Gambling Commission licensee sits inside the Money Laundering, Terrorist Financing and Transfer of Funds (Information on the Payer) Regulations 2017, the domestic instrument that transposes the Fourth and Fifth Anti-Money Laundering Directives and, in scope terms, the Sixth. The regulations do not hand the operator a single deposit figure at which a check must trigger.
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Chapter 05
Coming off GamStop
This page is written by someone who spent nine years reading the returning-customer flag from the compliance side of the console. It sets out the process a UK adult follows to close a live GamStop exclusion once the minimum period has expired, and it does so from the perspective of the operator's compliance team that receives the returning customer at the other end of the register.
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Chapter 06
Getting support
The National Gambling Helpline on 0808 8020 133 is the entry point most UKGC-licensed safer gambling teams share with a customer at the close of a Player Interaction. The service is delivered by GamCare, it is free, it is confidential, and it runs 24 hours a day, seven days a week, every day of the year.