A new casino not on GamStop is one licensed abroad, usually in Curaçao, Anjouan or Kahnawà:ke, rather than in Great Britain. Such a site cannot see the national self-exclusion register, so an exclusion does not stop it. It is not licensed here, UK protections do not apply, and any dispute has to go to a foreign regulator.
GamStop gets typed as "gamestop" more often than anyone at the scheme would like, which is a fitting slip for a register that turns out to have rather a lot of gaps in it. GamStop Online is this country's national online self-exclusion scheme, run by The National Online Self Exclusion Scheme Limited, free to use, and the sort of machinery that only impresses you once you see what it does not reach.
What follows is about the subset of the market that sits outside it: the casinos launched in the past couple of years that hold no Gambling Commission licence, take British customers anyway, and market themselves, more or less openly, as somewhere a GamStop registration will not follow. That last claim is true, which is precisely the problem.
The register held 614,738 people as of July 2026, and more than one in two of them had chosen the maximum five-year term. Those are people who decided, once, that they wanted a door closed. An offshore site is a second door, and it is not closed. I have spent enough years reading operator terms and regulator notices to say plainly that the sites which advertise hardest on this point are rarely the ones with anything else to recommend them.
Table of Contents14
- The Numbers Behind the Pitch
- One Benchmark Worth Checking
- What the Licence Is Worth
- GamStop, the Register, and the Seven-Year Tail
- What an Offshore Licence Actually Involves
- Comparing Offshore Licences on the Facts
- Where Identity Checks Go Wrong
- Five Signs a Site Can Be Trusted
- Checking a Site Before You Register
- Payouts, Regulators and the Complaint You Cannot Make
- How Self-Exclusion Actually Behaves
- What a New Site Outside the Scheme Really Gives You
- Questions About New Casinos Not on GamStop
- The Case Against the Pitch
The Numbers Behind the Pitch
The arithmetic of this corner of the market is unusually legible, because the Gambling Commission publishes it.
Its Illegal Markets team has issued 3,140 cease and desist and disruption notices since April 2024, comprising 2,032 cease and desist notices, 774 registrar referrals, 402 host referrals and 3 payment provider referrals. It made its first referral to the card network Visa in January 2025 after a test purchase, and has since made three more covering three separate unlicensed websites. The Commission's own estimate of total GB consumer time spent on illegal gambling sites was 306 million minutes in January 2025, 116 million in June 2025 and 152 million in July 2025.
Then there is the compliance that cannot be fixed by blocking anything: 96.3 per cent of withdrawals cleared automatically across 44.2 million customer withdrawals at large online operators between June and September 2024. That is what a regulated payout queue looks like. An offshore operator answers to no one who publishes a figure, and the Gambling Commission has said repeatedly that delays at the point of withdrawal, rather than deposit, are where the customer's interests lose to the operator's.
One Benchmark Worth Checking
If a single published number sums this market up, it is this: 561,983 active exclusions on the GamStop register at 31 December 2025, with 117,756 new registrations during 2025. And 58,675 of those registrations landed in the final six months of the year, an average of 319 a day.
Read that second half again. Growth of that kind is not a fringe phenomenon. Whenever I see the pitch that a site sits outside GamStop as though it were a convenience feature, I think of 319 people a day and wonder how many of them were told.
What the Licence Is Worth
The baseline here is not a matter of opinion. Section 33 of the Gambling Act 2005 makes it an offence to provide facilities for gambling without an operating licence, and it is immaterial whether the facilities are provided wholly or partly by remote communication, and whether they are provided inside or outside the UK. On summary conviction the offence carries up to 51 weeks' imprisonment, a fine up to level 5 on the standard scale, or both. The Commission states plainly that offering commercial gambling services to consumers in Great Britain is illegal without a Commission licence, including where the operator holds a licence in another jurisdiction.
For remote gambling, section 33 bites where at least one piece of remote gambling equipment used is situated in Great Britain, or where the provider knows or should know the facilities are being used, or are likely to be used, in Great Britain. The offshore casino's licence is genuine in the jurisdiction that issued it. That is the whole of the story: it simply has no purchase on British law.
GamStop, the Register, and the Seven-Year Tail
GamStop Online is a single request that excludes a person from gambling with all online gambling companies licensed in Great Britain. Since 31 March 2020, participating in the scheme has been a condition of the licence itself, sitting in the Commission's LCCP social responsibility code provision 3.5.5. The Commission had teeth ready and used them: on 3 April 2020 it suspended the licences of two operators for missing the integration deadline.
The important part is what happens at the end. Signing up takes a few minutes, and the block can take up to 24 hours to become effective. The chosen term is 6 months, 1 year, 5 years, or 5 years with auto-renewal. Once registered, the registration cannot be cancelled or deactivated during the exclusion period. And it does not quietly lapse: the exclusion stays in place after the end of the chosen period unless the person contacts GamStop to remove it. If they never do, GamStop holds the data through a further automatic seven-year self-exclusion period during which operators are told the person was previously excluded. Auto-renewal can only be switched off in the last six months of a five-year minimum exclusion period, and it runs for up to four further five-year periods.
An exclusion holds for its full term and then remains in place until the person contacts GamStop to take it off. That is the design, and it is deliberate.
What an Offshore Licence Actually Involves
Take Curaçao, which still issues the most licences seen behind these launches. The National Ordinance on Games of Chance took effect on 24 December 2024, making the Curaçao Gaming Authority the direct licensing and supervisory authority and 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 advises that a historic /JAZ number must not be treated as proof of a current licence.
The fee structure is public. A B2C application costs a one-time non-refundable EUR 4,592, plus EUR 150 per ultimate beneficial owner and EUR 150 per qualified interest holder. The annual B2C total is EUR 47,450, made up of EUR 24,490 to the National Treasury and EUR 22,960 to the CGA, payable by 15 January.
Verification is possible, and worth doing. The CGA issues a Certificate of Operation Seal only to B2C operators, only for an approved and registered player-facing domain; clicking it must redirect to cert.cga.cw. If the certificate behind the seal shows a different domain from the one being visited, the seal belongs to somebody else. The CGA's own portal went out of service in October 2026, which has muddied that picture, and the authority says it is working on an alternative way to verify licensed domains.
Anjouan
Anjouan is a constituent territory of the Union of the Comoros, and its framework rests on legislation adopted in 2005. The Anjouan Gaming Authority names the Anjouan Offshore Financial Authority as the competent regulator, with Anjouan Licensing Services Inc. as the sole authorised licence administrator. Published fees are EUR 17,828 for B2C issuance, one-time, and EUR 17,828 for annual renewal, with EUR 500 per additional domain.
That is cheap, and cheap is the point. 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 each per year, and that Comorian financial intelligence officials described Anjouan Corporate Services as operating illegally; a former attorney-general of the Comoros called the licensing entity "an illegal entity". Anjouan Gaming's own statement of 10 June 2026 conceded that its licence "is not, and has never been presented as, a universal authorisation to operate in every country in the world". Its certificates carry a licence number and a QR code linking to a public register, and the authority says a certificate that cannot be verified there should not be relied on.
Kahnawà:ke
The Kahnawà:ke Gaming Commission was established in 1996 and enacted its interactive gaming regulations on 8 July 1999, which gives it the longest track record of the three. Licensed operators must be hosted at Mohawk Internet Technologies, a data centre in the Mohawk Territory managed by Continent 8 Technologies. The Commission's Logo Certificate Program, effective 15 January 2010, lets a player click the Commission's logo to generate a Certificate of Good Standing. Fees are steep — the Client Provider Authorization application fee rises from USD 35,000 to USD 40,000 on 1 January 2027, with the annual fee staying at USD 20,000 — and the Commission suspends holders when it needs to, as it did with a Client Provider Authorization effective 29 September 2026.
Costa Rica, or Nothing at All
Some sites hold nothing worth the name. Costa Rica has no comprehensive gambling licensing regime and no formal framework for issuing gambling licences; the "data processing license" that turns up in industry copy is not a licence in the strict legal sense. The Legislative Assembly rejected Bill No. 25,057 in early 2026, which would have introduced a mandatory regime. Zero fee, zero supervision.
Comparing Offshore Licences on the Facts
| Licence | Regulator and framework | One-off cost | Annual cost | What a player can verify |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Curaçao (B2C) | Curaçao Gaming Authority under the LOK, effective 24 December 2024 | EUR 4,592 application, plus EUR 150 per UBO | EUR 47,450 (EUR 24,490 treasury + EUR 22,960 supervisory) | Certificate of Operation seal redirecting to cert.cga.cw; domain must match |
| Anjouan (B2C) | Anjouan Gaming Authority, framework from 2005 legislation | EUR 17,828 issuance | EUR 17,828 renewal | Licence number and QR code linking to the public register |
| Kahnawà:ke | Kahnawà:ke Gaming Commission, regulations enacted 8 July 1999 | USD 40,000 CPA application from 1 January 2027 | USD 20,000 annual CPA fee | Logo Certificate Program generating a Certificate of Good Standing |
| Costa Rica | No gambling licensing regime; Bill No. 25,057 rejected in early 2026 | None | None | Nothing — no register exists |
| Great Britain (for contrast) | Gambling Commission under the Gambling Act 2005 | Not published as a single figure | Levy set at 1.1% of previous-year Gross Gambling Yield for online operators | The Commission's public register, checked against the site's activities and domain names |
The contrast column is the one that decides things. The statutory levy alone is 1.1 per cent of previous-year Gross Gambling Yield for all online operators, and it raised just under £120 million in the year reported, ringfenced for research, prevention and treatment of gambling-related harm.
Where Identity Checks Go Wrong
The single thing this topic turns on is identity verification, because that is where a person finds out what kind of business they are dealing with. Under the Money Laundering Regulations, remote casinos must identify and verify a customer when they deposit funds to take part in remote gambling, or withdraw such funds or winnings, amounting to €2,000 or more. That threshold applies both to a single transaction and to transactions that appear to be linked, including where they form part of the customer's overall activity in a single logged-on period.
Under Commission licence condition 17.1.1, the required information includes the customer's name, address and date of birth, and it must be obtained and verified before the customer is permitted to gamble. The Commission's expectation, restated in August 2026, is that identity and age checks are brought forward to before a deposit or stake, and it has warned that onboarding on incomplete or inaccurate information — initials instead of full names, nicknames, commercial addresses instead of residential — is not sufficient. That is not decoration. Onboarding a customer under a middle name can create mismatches with records held elsewhere, including GamStop, which undermines the exclusion itself.
It should work the same way later on. Licence condition 17.1.1 says a withdrawal request must not trigger a demand for additional information if the licensee could reasonably have requested it earlier, and the only carve-out is information it must obtain at that moment under another legal obligation, such as anti-money-laundering rules. Over a quarter of complaints reaching the Commission's contact centre concern identity verification, and a 2026 blog pinned the pattern precisely: customers asked for documents only when they try to withdraw. That operator may be in breach of condition 17.
The warning signs are worth learning. A site that lets an account trade all evening and only wants a document upload at the cashier's window. A site whose verification page has no stated list of acceptable documents. A site that answers a question about why documents are needed with a sentence about "our security procedures" and nothing else. Any of those is a business betting on the customer giving up.
Five Signs a Site Can Be Trusted
Trust here is a procedure, not a feeling. Each of these takes minutes.
The Licence Is Verifiable on a Register, Not Just a Footer
Look for a named regulator, a licence number and a working route to a register. On a Curaçao site, that means clicking the Certificate of Operation seal and confirming it redirects to cert.cga.cw and shows the same domain. No working link, no claim.
Funds Are Held Separately and the Rating Is Stated
Licence condition 4.1.1 requires customer funds at a remote operator to sit in a separate client bank account, and operators must choose one of three insolvency-protection ratings — "not protected", "medium protection" or "high protection" — and state which applies in their terms. A "not protected" operator must remind customers every six months, with the value of funds stated.
Withdrawals Carry No Inbuilt Delay
Licence condition 17.1.1 forbids late document demands, and the Commission's guidance forbids terms that cap how much a customer may withdraw from their deposit balance — its example of a prohibited term is "You may withdraw up to £50 per day and up to £500 per week". Read the cashier terms before depositing.
The Complaints Route Names a Real Adjudicator
Approved ADR providers include IBAS, eCOGRA, CEDR, ADR Group, Pegasus ADR Service, ProMediate and the Tattersalls Committee. A site with no named adjudicator, no timescale and no deadlock letter procedure has nowhere for a dispute to go.
The Bonus Terms Are Short Enough to Read
Since 19 January 2026, wagering requirements on bonus funds are capped at ten times, and mixed-product promotions requiring two or more types of gambling are banned. A site offering 40× or 60× playthrough is telling you which rulebook it follows.
Checking a Site Before You Register
- Find the licence number and match it to a register. Pick the named regulator, open its register and confirm the licence is current and the domain on it matches the site. A licence with an ended certificate, such as a legacy orange Curaçao sub-licence, is history rather than authority.
- Click the seal and read the certificate. It should lead to the regulator's verification page and show the domain you are on. If it shows someone else's domain, the seal has been copied.
- Read the withdrawal and verification terms first. Look for maximum withdrawal caps, one-withdrawal-at-a-time clauses and manual-review triggers. The Commission fined one operator £900,000 in October 2026 partly over a term allowing only one withdrawal at a time and the manual review of every fifth or tenth withdrawal.
- Add up the wagering requirement. Multiply the bonus by the playthrough figure and check the contribution table for the games actually played. Slots may count 100 per cent while roulette counts 5 per cent, which turns a 10× requirement into 200× on the games a player prefers.
- Set a deposit limit and a bank-level block before the first deposit. Since 31 October 2025 a licensee must prompt for a financial limit before the first deposit, with setting one as the default and declining requiring a positive action. Bank blocks work on gambling merchant category codes and are applied per card, with a cooling-off of either 48 or 72 hours at most banks.
- Write down the help numbers now. The National Gambling Helpline, run by GamCare, is free on 0808 8020 133, 24 hours a day, every day of the year; callers in Wales can use 0808 2819 265. GamFam supports families, and Gamblers Anonymous England, Wales & Ulster runs around 250 meeting locations.
Payouts, Regulators and the Complaint You Cannot Make
Withdrawal speed is the fairest single test of a casino, because it is the moment the operator stops earning and starts paying. The regulated benchmark is stark: across 44.2 million withdrawals by customers of large online operators between June and September 2024, 96.3 per cent cleared automatically, 3.5 per cent cleared within 24 hours and 0.1 per cent took up to 48 hours. The Commission has also said that where it has no regulatory concerns about a customer, there is no valid reason to delay a payout, and it has permanently banned reverse withdrawals — requirement 14B states that consumers must not be given the option to cancel their withdrawal request.
An offshore site is under none of that. There is no LCCP condition 17.1.1, no CMA undertaking, no approved ADR provider sitting behind it because the Commission requires one, and no route to the Commission at all. The Commission is a regulator and not an ombudsman; it cannot resolve an individual complaint or get anyone's money back.
The regulator's own warning notice of 20 January 2025 said the quiet part out loud: unlicensed websites reachable from Great Britain often target customers who have self-excluded through GamStop, and may have inadequate social responsibility and anti-money-laundering controls. That is not a general smear on offshore operators. It is the Commission describing the audience the pitch is aimed at.
How Self-Exclusion Actually Behaves
Cluster phrases around this topic all circle the same question, so it is worth settling. Whether it is a new casino not on GamStop or a site that has been running for a decade, the exclusion itself behaves in one way.
Under the scheme's terms of use, a registration cannot be removed early, and the Group's 2025 annual report devotes a section to its refusal to do so. A five-year term with auto-renewal can only have the auto-renewal switched off during the final six months, and it runs for up to four further five-year periods. Where a person does nothing at the end of their term, the further automatic seven-year retention applies and operators are told that person was previously excluded. Land-based arrangements differ in detail — SENSE, the national scheme for licensed land-based casinos, allows removal only in person at a casino during the six-month "Thinking" period that follows the minimum term, with a 24-hour cooling-off period afterwards — but the principle is the same one.
None of this is a wall around a person, and it was never sold as one. It is a wall around licensed British operators.
What a New Site Outside the Scheme Really Gives You
A casino launched last year and licensed in Curaçao, Anjouan or Kahnawà:ke is not licensed in Great Britain, cannot see the national register, and cannot enforce an exclusion that the person chose to put in place. Whether it is a new casino sites not on GamStop list somebody has compiled or a banner on a forum, the underlying position does not change. A new UK casinos not on GamStop offering is an offshore product with a British accent.
The blocking software the scheme itself signposts is the honest alternative. Gamban states it blocks licensed and unlicensed sites and is designed to be as difficult to remove as possible, though the free TalkBanStop UK licence ended on 31 March 2026, leaving it free in Wales and £4.99 a month or £29.99 a year in England and Scotland after a 7-day trial. BetBlocker, a Delaware non-profit, states it blocks over 1,368,000 gambling websites and 3,100 apps, needs no registration and is free worldwide.
For anyone who wants help rather than a rule to work around, the National Gambling Helpline is free on 0808 8020 133, day or night, every day of the year, and the NHS has built a treatment network — 15 specialist clinics opened across England since 2019, with integrated care boards commissioning eight regional services that now receive almost 5,000 referrals a year against a target of 3,000.
Questions About New Casinos Not on GamStop
Are new casinos not on GamStop legal?
They are operating illegally if they offer commercial gambling to consumers in Great Britain without a Gambling Commission licence — section 33 of the Gambling Act 2005 makes that an offence by the operator, and it applies whether or not the operator holds a licence elsewhere. The offence attaches to the provider, not to the customer, and the Commission states the position plainly.
Can an offshore casino check the GamStop register?
No. The register's obligations apply to operators licensed in Great Britain, and GamStop itself states that it can only exclude a person from participating operators and cannot prevent access to services run by organisations that do not participate. The Commission's licence condition 3.5.5 binds holders of Commission licences; it does not reach a Curaçao or Anjouan licensee.
Which licence should a site hold to be trustworthy?
There is no offshore licence that gives a British player the same footing, so the honest answer is the Gambling Commission's register. If an offshore licence is what is on offer, prefer one where the regulator verifies domains publicly and cheaply — Curaçao's Certificate of Operation is domain-specific, which makes a copied seal easy to catch. Anjouan and Kahnawà:ke both publish register-verifiable certificates too.
How long does a GamStop exclusion last?
Between 6 months and 5 years, with a 5-year option that renews automatically for up to four further five-year periods. Signing up takes minutes but can take up to 24 hours to take effect, and the registration cannot be cancelled during the term. It then stays in place until the person contacts GamStop to remove it, and unremoved data is held through a further automatic seven-year period.
Do offshore casinos pay withdrawals faster?
Not on any published evidence, and there is no regulator publishing their timings. The comparison that exists is the other way round: 96.3 per cent of 44.2 million withdrawals at large licensed operators cleared automatically between June and September 2024. Complaints about withdrawals have been the number one topic at the Commission's contact centre, and the Commission has repeatedly said delays at the cashier rather than the deposit page are unacceptable.
What help is there for someone who wants to stop?
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 & Ulster runs around 250 meeting locations, and GamFam supports families and friends, whether or not the person gambling seeks help.
The Case Against the Pitch
The pitch is a promise of a fresh start — a brand new casino, brand new bonuses, no register looking over the shoulder — and it should be read for what it is: the sale of an absence. What is missing is the licence, the published withdrawal statistics, the named adjudicator, the ten-times wagering cap, the ban on reverse withdrawals and the ten years of complaint data behind all of it.
A footnote to finish with, because it is the number I keep coming back to. Across 160 illegal gambling websites for which traffic data existed, the Commission measured an average 32 per cent fall in engagement after disruption action, and registrar blocks produced an average 91 per cent drop. Disruption works. That is the thing these sites are betting against.