New Casinos Not on GamStop and How the Exclusion Works

A new casino not on GamStop holds no Gambling Commission licence, so it sits outside the UK's national online self-exclusion scheme. Signing up with GamStop blocks every operator licensed in Great Britain for between six months and five years, and the exclusion remains in place after that term until the person contacts GamStop to remove it.

The phrase "new casinos not on GamStop" arrives in my inbox most weeks, usually as a question about whether a fresh offshore brand is worth the trouble. It is worth separating the two ideas in it. New is a marketing fact: a site with a recent launch date and a welcome offer to match. Not on GamStop is a legal one: no Gambling Commission licence, no access to the scheme that 614,738 people were on as of July 2026, no UK protections, and no help from the British complaints machinery if a withdrawal stalls. Those two facts get bundled together by affiliates because the combination sells — a new brand, plus a promise of escape from a block. The escape part deserves scrutiny. GamStop's own terms are blunt about it: registration cannot be ended early, and the block stays up after the chosen period expires unless the person asks for it to come down. A site outside the scheme does not shorten any of that. It just means nobody is checking. The piece below deals with what an offshore licence actually is, what a fresh brand's paperwork tends to look like, and how long the exclusion goes on running regardless. As of 13.11.2026, the market moves faster than the rules do.

The Licence Behind a New Site, and What It Is Worth

A British licence and an offshore one are not two versions of the same thing. One carries conditions, funding and an enforcement team; the other is a registration fee and a set of published standards, and what follows from it depends almost entirely on the regime.

New Casino Sites Not on GamStop and What the Badge Certifies

The Commission's position is unambiguous. It states plainly that it is illegal for anyone to offer commercial gambling services to consumers in Great Britain without a licence from the Commission, and that this includes a case where the operator holds a licence somewhere else. Under section 33 of the Gambling Act 2005, providing facilities for gambling without an operating licence carries, on summary conviction, up to 51 weeks' imprisonment, a fine at level 5, or both. The offence sits with the operator, not the customer — that distinction matters and I will come back to it. What it means for a new site is that the badge in its footer is a claim about paperwork filed in another country.

Which country matters. Curaçao rebuilt its regime under the National Ordinance on Games of Chance, in force since 24 December 2024, replacing the old master-licence model with direct licensing by the Curaçao Gaming Authority. The legacy sub-licences, the ones sold on under historic /JAZ numbers, ended on 15 October 2025. The CGA's own certification policy says a click on its Certificate of Operation Seal must redirect to cert.cga.cw, and that a seal differing in design, colour or format means the site is not authorised. If the certificate behind the seal names a different domain, someone else's certificate is on display. There is a wrinkle: on 7 October 2026 the CGA said its previous online portal would not return and that it was building an alternative way to verify licensed domains, because the old digital seal may be affected by the transition. Verification, in other words, is temporarily harder than it was — a gift to anyone copying a seal.

Anjouan licenses under legislation adopted in 2005. Its published fees are EUR 17,828 for B2C issuance and the same again each year, with EUR 500 per extra domain. Its own statement of 10 June 2026 concedes that an Anjouan licence "is not, and has never been presented as, a universal authorisation to operate in every country in the world", and that no authority can exempt an operator from local law where local authorisation is required. That is the regulator agreeing with the regulator. Anjouan's certificates carry a licence number and a QR code linking to a public register, and the authority says certificates that cannot be verified there should not be relied on. Meanwhile 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 EUR 17,000 a year, and quoted Comoros financial intelligence officials describing Anjouan Corporate Services as operating illegally, with a former attorney-general of the Comoros calling the licensing entity "an illegal entity". Anjouan Gaming disputes the characterisation, and the independent legal opinion it relies on is reported by the licensee rather than the regulator. Unconfirmed, and the person buying the badge should weigh it accordingly.

Kahnawà:ke has regulated interactive gaming since its 1999 regulations and describes itself as having done so longer than almost any other jurisdiction. Operators must be hosted at Mohawk Internet Technologies. The Commission's Logo Certificate Program lets a player click the logo and generate a Certificate of Good Standing for that site. Fees rise on 1 January 2027: a Client Provider Authorisation application goes from USD 35,000 to USD 40,000, and the annual CPA fee stays at USD 20,000. The Commission suspended one holder's CPA on 29 September 2026 following a Show Cause Notice, which tells you the regime does occasionally act.

Malta is a different order of thing — an EU member state with a B2C licence, a EUR 25,000 annual fee, 5% gaming tax on revenue and minimum share capital of EUR 100,000 for Type 1 and Type 2 licences. It also publishes a list of Unauthorised URLs and states that any reference to the MGA on those domains is false. And then there is Costa Rica, where there is no comprehensive gambling licensing regime at all. The "data processing license" sometimes cited in the trade is not a licence in the strict legal sense, and a bill that would have created a mandatory regime, No. 25,057, was rejected in early 2026.

New UK Casinos Not on GamStop and Why Standards Differ

This is where British licensing sets the comparison, and the comparison is not kind to the alternatives.

A UK-licensed operator must participate in the national multi-operator self-exclusion scheme under social responsibility code provision 3.5.5 of the Licence Conditions and Codes of Practice — "Licensees must participate in the national multi-operator self-exclusion scheme". Since 31 March 2020 that has been a condition of holding a licence, and in April 2020 the Commission added a requirement to check the entire customer base against the register at least every 24 hours, which also stops registered people receiving direct marketing. Two operators had their licences suspended on 3 April 2020 for missing the March deadline.

The rest of the package follows the same logic: credit cards banned for gambling from 14 April 2020; online slots stakes capped at £5 per game cycle from 9 April 2025 and £2 for those aged 18 to 24 from 21 May 2025; wagering requirements on bonus funds capped at ten times from 19 January 2026, with mixed-product promotions banned on the same date; financial vulnerability checks from August 2024, with the threshold lowered to £150 net deposits over 30 days on 28 February 2025. None of those conditions travels with an offshore licence. A Curaçao, Anjouan or Kahnawà:ke operator may run a perfectly decent site — Anjouan requires segregated player funds, certified random number generators and AML and age checks — but it is not obliged to do the British version of any of it, and no British body audits whether it does.

The regulator's own warning is worth reading in full. On 20 January 2025 the Commission issued an industry warning notice about casino games supplied by licensed operators appearing on unlicensed websites available to GB consumers, noting that such sites often target customers who have self-excluded via GAMSTOP and may have inadequate social responsibility and anti-money-laundering controls. That is the regulator saying, in a published notice, who the audience is thought to be.

Payment Methods at New Casinos Not on GamStop

No payment method would make an offshore casino safe. Pay by phone at an offshore site usually means the charge appears on a mobile bill, which lengthens the paper trail rather than shortening it, and it removes the bank-level block that a UK customer can switch on. Eleven banks offer a gambling block on the Commission's list last updated 16 October 2026, and those blocks work by declining payments to merchants categorised under gambling Merchant Category Codes, applied at card level. A mobile-billing payment sits outside that mechanism, and offshore processors sit outside the Payment Services Regulations 2017, which licence condition 5.1.2 requires UK operators to use for Great Britain customers. The practical result is that the money leaves with less friction and returns with less recourse.

How Long a Self-Exclusion Lasts, and What Ends It

This site looks at every topic from the same angle: how self-exclusion works and how long it lasts. So here is the mechanism, because it is the single thing the whole "not on GamStop" question turns on.

GamStop Online is the UK's national online self-exclusion scheme, run by The National Online Self Exclusion Scheme Limited. It is free. It was established in June 2017 by the Remote Gambling Association at the request of DCMS and the Gambling Commission, went live on 27 April 2018, and was renamed Gamstop Online in November 2025 following a website update. The name is a constant source of confusion — it is often typed "gamestop", which is a different word entirely — but the scheme registered 117,756 new users during 2025 and had 561,983 active exclusions at the end of that year. In the first half of 2026 registrations rose 16% year on year, with May 2026 setting a monthly record of 12,236.

The first time, signing up takes a few minutes and up to 24 hours to take effect, which is a real window and not a formality. After that there is no dial to turn. Once registered, the exclusion cannot be cancelled or deactivated during the period. When the period ends, it stays in place unless the person contacts GamStop to remove it. The terms, last updated 20 May 2026, add two details that surprise people who read them late: the auto-renewal option can only be switched off during the final six months of a five-year minimum exclusion period, and if nothing happens after the chosen term, GamStop holds the data through a further automatic seven-year self-exclusion period during which operators are told the person was previously excluded. Registrations cannot be removed early, and the Group's 2025 annual report devotes a section to its refusal to do so. Of those on the register in July 2026, more than one in two had chosen the maximum five years. Only one in four had picked six months.

Different schemes, different mechanics, same stubbornness. Under LCCP ordinary code 3.5.2 the minimum land-based self-exclusion period is not less than six and not more than twelve months, extendable in further six-month blocks, remains in place a further six months at the end unless the customer takes positive action to gamble again, and carries a one-day cooling-off period. SENSE, the scheme covering licensed land-based casinos in Great Britain, sets a minimum of six months extendable to twelve, with removal requestable only in person at a casino during the six-month "Thinking" period that follows, after which a 24-hour cooling-off applies. Gamstop Betting Shops, formerly MOSES and run by telephone on 0800 294 2060, excludes a customer from named bookmakers' shops for a fixed twelve months that cannot be ended early. The Gambling Commission's May 2026 FOI response counted 12,445 active SENSE customers between 1 April 2025 and 1 April 2026 and 9,075 for M.O.S.E.S over the same period.

Warning signs are easy to read once the mechanism is understood. A site that advertises itself as the answer to a self-exclusion, rather than simply as an offshore operator, is selling the loophole. A site that implies the block can be lifted early, or that a new brand is outside the register's reach, is misdescribing the scheme — nothing about registering at a new domain removes a GamStop registration. And a site whose terms are silent on the point is not neutral: silence leaves the customer to conclude that the block does not apply to them.

The one area where GamStop genuinely has nothing to say is an operator that never joined. The scheme's obligations apply to UKGC-licensed operators only, and GamStop says it is unable to prevent access to gambling services run by organisations that do not participate [unconfirmed — consistent with GamStop's own terms of use, though stated most directly by trade sources]. That is a gap in coverage, not a route through the block. And separate from all of it, blocking software exists: Gamban and BetBlocker, both signposted by GamStop. BetBlocker blocks over 1,368,000 gambling websites and 3,100 apps, requires no registration and is free worldwide. Gamban blocks licensed and unlicensed sites and is designed to be as hard to remove as possible; since TalkBanStop funding ended on 31 March 2026 it is free in Wales but costs £4.99 a month or £29.99 a year in England and Scotland after a seven-day trial.

What the Numbers Say About Offshore Sites

If an offshore site is worth anything, the claim should be testable. Here is the test I use, method by method — not brand by brand, because brands lie and methods do not.

The enforcement numbers behind the table are the Commission's, and they are consecutive. Since April 2024 its Illegal Markets team had issued 3,140 cease and desist and disruption notices by October 2025 — 2,032 C&Ds, 774 registrar referrals, 402 host referrals and 3 payment provider referrals — along with 447,778 Bing and Google URL referrals and 287,961 removals. Over that period, illegal sites referred to search engines rose from 124 in July–September 2024 to 321 in April–June 2025. Then the pace changed: 366 websites in April to June 2026, and 1,835 in July to September 2026. Disruption works unevenly. Registrar blocks and suspensions cut average engagement by 91%, GEO IP blocking by 60%, Google removal by 30% and Facebook removal by 8%. The Commission says plainly that GEO IP and registrar blocks beat search-engine removals, because removal makes a site harder to find but does not fully block access.

Scale, for honesty's sake. H2 Gambling Capital reckons £16.6 billion was staked with illegal operators in the UK in 2025, up from about £5 billion in 2019, with the legal share of gambling falling from 97% to 92%. A Frontier Economics study for the Betting and Gaming Council conservatively put £2.7 billion a year on the online black market, 2.1% of the £128 billion staked with regulated remote operators. Yield Sec's analysis for the Campaign for Fairer Gambling put the GB online market at £8.8 billion in 2025, 9% of it unregulated. The Commission's own survey, published 5 November 2026, estimates 0.6% of all respondents engaged with an illegal gambling website in the previous four weeks — 2.5% among those who had gambled online. Nobody agrees on the size, which is itself the finding.

Five Signs a New Offshore Operator Can Be Trusted

None of these is a guarantee. Together they separate a professionally run offshore site from a landing page with a countdown clock.

### The Licence Is Verifiable and Current

Not just named. Curaçao's legacy sub-licences ended on 15 October 2025, so a site still displaying a historic /JAZ number or an orange certificate is showing something the regulator says must not be treated as proof of a current licence. Anjouan certificates carry a licence number and a QR code that should resolve to the public register. Kahnawà:ke's logo should generate a Certificate of Good Standing. Check the certificate names the domain you are actually on.

### Player Funds Are Segregated, in Writing

Anjouan's published standards require segregation of player funds from operational funds. In the UK, licence condition 4.1.1 requires customer funds in a separate client bank account, and operators must pick one of three protection ratings — "not protected", "medium protection", "high protection" — and disclose it. Read the terms; a segregated account is not insurance, and gambling businesses are legally allowed to hold customer money in overseas bank accounts.

### Withdrawals Have No Built-In Delay

The UK regulator's own record gives the benchmark. Of 44.2 million withdrawals by customers of large online operators between June and September 2024, 96.3% cleared automatically, 3.5% within 24 hours and 0.1% took up to 48 hours. Reverse withdrawal — the option to cancel a payout request — was banned for all remote operators under RTS requirement 14B on 31 October 2021, with guidance that once a withdrawal is requested the customer must not be offered the chance to deposit those funds again. A new offshore site that still offers that button has told you what it thinks of friction.

### The Bonus Terms Are Short Enough to Read

An offshore welcome offer at 35x to 50x wagering, with no-deposit offers at 40x to 60x and a €50–€100 cashout cap, is the range trade comparisons report [unconfirmed]. The UK cap is ten times, in force since 19 January 2026, and the Commission chose a cap over a ban because it judged licensees would otherwise write terms preventing customers cashing bonuses out at all, noting that some had applied up to 60 times. Ten times is the number to hold an offshore offer against.

### Complaints Reach a Real Adjudicator

Anjouan requires licensees to designate an approved alternative dispute resolution provider and to publish its details in player-facing terms, expecting complaints resolved within 30 days before escalation; the approved providers include EGIS ADR, Axion ADR, iGaming ADR and others. Kahnawà:ke employs a full-time Dispute Resolution Officer. Check that the named provider exists and that the site's own complaints route matches what the regulator says it should be. The Commission's figure is instructive: over a quarter of complaints reaching its Contact Centre concern identity verification, mostly from people asked for documents only at the point of withdrawal.

Six Checks Before Anyone Uses a New Name

Lawful, ordinary, unglamorous. Each one has a reason attached.

1. Check the Gambling Commission's public register for the domain. The Commission advises consumers to check before gambling that the business holds a British licence and to click through to the register to see whether the site's activities and domain names match. A missing domain is the end of the enquiry.
2. Read section 33 of the Gambling Act 2005 alongside the site's footer. The offence attaches to the provider, not the player, and it applies where at least one piece of remote gambling equipment is in Great Britain, or where the provider knows or should know the facilities are likely to be used here. Knowing what the operator is risking is part of reading the offer.
3. Look up the licence number in the licensing authority's own register, not the site's seal. Curaçao's portal was offline from 7 October 2026, so a copied seal is currently indistinguishable by eye. Anjouan says a certificate that cannot be verified in the public register must not be relied on as evidence of licensing. Kahnawà:ke's certificate generator does the same job.
4. Read the withdrawal and identity-verification clauses together, before depositing. Licence condition 17.1.1 requires that a withdrawal request must not trigger a demand for information the licensee could reasonably have requested earlier — and the Commission says delaying a payout for insufficient ID may breach it. An offshore site has no such obligation, so its terms are the only warning available.
5. Decide whether the exclusion still applies, because it does. A GamStop registration stands for its whole term and stays in place after the term ends until the person contacts GamStop to remove it. Nothing about a new domain changes that, and no offshore site can remove it. If the point of the search was a way round the block, there is not one.
6. Set the protections that do not depend on the operator's goodwill. GamStop signposts Gamban and BetBlocker; a bank gambling block is available at Bank of Scotland, Barclays, Halifax, HSBC, Lloyds, MBNA, Monzo, NatWest, Royal Bank of Scotland, Santander and Starling, and works at card level so it must be switched on for each card. Most banks use a 48-hour or 72-hour cooling-off before gambling transactions resume, and the block does not touch a credit score.

Complaints, Money and Where the Two Part Company

The gap between a UK-licensed operator and an offshore one is widest here, and it is entirely procedural.

A UK licensee must let a customer refer a dispute to an approved ADR provider, free of charge, if it is not resolved to satisfaction within eight weeks of the complaint, and the customer must have gone through the operator's own procedure first — the operator may issue a deadlock letter. The approved providers include ADR Group, Pegasus ADR Service, Blexr, CEDR, eCOGRA, IBAS, ProMediate and the Tattersalls Committee. eCOGRA's Great Britain report for 1 October 2024 to 30 September 2025 records 911 disputes received, 150 valid "Deposits & Withdrawals" disputes, an average 31 days to resolve domestic cases and 17.8% of completed disputes decided for the consumer. IBAS's report for the same period records 3,721 domestic disputes, 217 of them Banking/Financial, average completion 20 days, and 100% operator compliance with decisions in the consumer's favour. Note the pattern: consumers win a minority of contested cases, but the decisions get honoured.

An offshore site has none of that. A complaint goes to the operator's own support queue, then to whichever ADR provider its regulator requires it to name — if the regulator requires one at all. Costa Rica requires nothing, because there is no licensing regime to require it. And the Commission is a regulator, not an ombudsman: it cannot resolve individual complaints or help anyone get money back, though it records every complaint and typically refers disputes to an independent third party. That is worth saying plainly, because it catches people out on both sides of the licensed line.

The money itself has a similar shape. Customer funds held by a remote UK operator must sit in a separate client account, with an insolvency rating disclosed in writing and acknowledged before funds are used for gambling — but keeping funds separate does not mean customers get them back if the operator fails, and money staked in an open bet is not customer funds at all. Where an operator suspects money laundering it must file a Suspicious Activity Report and obtain a Defence Against Money Laundering from the National Crime Agency before moving funds back, which the Commission accepts may necessitate delay but insists does not give anyone the right to confiscate deposits. The Commission also says it is not acceptable for operators to introduce friction when a customer tries to withdraw rather than when they deposit. That tension — legal delay versus manufactured delay — is what most withdrawal disputes are actually about, and it is why the LCCP contains no fixed payout deadline and instead relies on fair and open terms, the identity-verification condition and the unfair-terms prohibition.

The identity check is the same story. Under the Money Laundering Regulations 2017, remote casinos must identify and verify when a customer deposits or withdraws €2,000 or more, singly or in linked transactions, and UK rules require identity verification before a customer is permitted to gamble at all. Offshore, only the regulator's own standards apply. Anjouan requires AML and CTF controls and age verification. Kahnawà:ke requires limits including zero and states its voluntary self-exclusion is permanent and irrevocable — and that a player who breaches a self-exclusion prohibition forfeits funds deposited or won to a charity chosen by the Commission. That last rule is the opposite of permissive, and it is the sort of detail an offshore operator's marketing never mentions.

The help side is not in doubt, and it is the same number whether the site was licensed here or not. The National Gambling Helpline, run by GamCare, is free on 0808 8020 133, 24 hours a day, every day of the year, with live chat and WhatsApp on the same number; callers in Wales can use 0808 2819 265. Gamblers Anonymous England, Wales and Ulster is on 0330 094 0322 with around 250 meeting locations. The NHS National Gambling Clinic at 69 Warwick Road, London SW5 9HB takes self-referrals, and NHS England had opened 15 specialist gambling clinics since 2019. Citizens Advice offers free, confidential help with gambling debt, and Citizens Advice Scotland runs a gambling support advice line on 0800 328 1131, Monday to Friday, 10am to 3pm. Treatment is funded by the statutory levy, which raised just under £120 million in its first year, ringfenced for research, prevention and treatment.

Frequently Asked Questions

### Can a new casino really be outside GamStop?

Yes, and the mechanism is simple. GamStop Online can only exclude people from participating operators, and participation is a condition of a Great Britain licence — the scheme says it cannot prevent access to gambling services run by organisations that do not take part. A new site without a UK licence never joined, so the scheme has nothing to check it against. The exclusion itself does not lapse.

### Do offshore operators have to honour a GamStop block?

No. There is no obligation on an operator outside the British licensing regime, and the Commission's own warning notice of 20 January 2025 says such sites often target customers who have self-excluded, sometimes with weak social responsibility and anti-money-laundering controls. An offshore site may choose to run its own exclusion process, and some do, but it is a choice, not a duty, and it is not the national scheme.

### What happens when a GamStop exclusion period finishes?

Nothing automatic. When the chosen period ends, the exclusion stays in place until the person contacts GamStop to remove it. If they do not, GamStop holds the data through a further automatic seven-year period during which operators are told they were previously excluded. On a five-year registration with auto-renewal, the terms allow that option to be switched off only in the final six months.

### Is a Curaçao licence still worth anything?

Less than it was, and the wording matters. Curaçao replaced its master-licence model with direct licensing under the LOK, which took effect on 24 December 2024; legacy sub-licences ended on 15 October 2025, and a historic /JAZ number must not be treated as current proof. A genuine Certificate of Operation is domain-specific and its seal should redirect to cert.cga.cw — though the CGA's portal went offline on 7 October 2026, which makes copying easier.

### Why do offshore sites take so long to pay out?

Sometimes lawfully, often not. UK operators face the Commission's finding that 96.3% of 44.2 million withdrawals cleared automatically between June and September 2024, and reverse withdrawal has been banned since 31 October 2021. Offshore, no such record exists and no such ban applies. Watch for a maximum cashout clause — one published offshore term limits bonus winnings to 300% of the credited bonus, voiding the excess.

### Where does someone get help with gambling?

The helpline details are listed above.

The Block Runs Longer Than the Site Does

A new casino not on GamStop is a fact about a licence, not a way past anything: the site has no British permission to trade, the UK's protections and complaints machinery do not follow it abroad, and the self-exclusion it is sold against carries on untouched — the registration holds for its full term and stays up afterwards until the person contacts GamStop to remove it.

Which leaves the arithmetic of novelty. 311 illegal websites had disruption action taken against them in Quarter 2 of 2026 to 2027, 38% more than the previous quarter, and 77% of those disrupted saw reduced traffic; 586 illegal sites accessible to GB consumers were identified in September 2026 alone. New domains are cheap and C&D notices are not instant, so the fresh-looking brand with the generous offer is usually a rearrangement of the paperwork rather than a new market. If anything does need saying again, the National Gambling Helpline is on 0808 8020 133, free, day or night.