GamStop and Crypto Operators: The Boundary of the Scheme, and What Lies Outside It

The scheme, as its own site describes it

GamStop is the national online self-exclusion scheme for Great Britain, operated by The National Online Self Exclusion Scheme Limited, a not-for-profit company. Registration is free. A registered player chooses six months, one year or five years, and the exclusion cannot be cancelled before the period ends. The scheme covers sites and apps licensed in Great Britain. By its own figures it holds over 614,000 registrations, more than half of them for five years, and registrations rose by 16 % in the first half of the year.

The scheme's own page states its reach in one line: it blocks sites licensed in Great Britain. Everything on this page follows from that line. A player who expects the scheme to reach further has misread the line, and most crypto casino marketing is written for that misreading.

The condition that makes membership compulsory

A Gambling Commission licensee operating online must participate in the national self-exclusion scheme; the requirement is a social responsibility code provision in the licence conditions and has applied since the spring of 2020. A licensee cannot opt out, and a player registered with GamStop who finds a licensee still letting them play has found a licence breach, not a gap in the scheme.

On our scale this is why GamStop has no criterion of its own. Membership follows the licence exactly: every operator in the left column of our comparison page is a member, and no operator in the right column can be. Criterion 1 scores it by construction, at forty points, and criterion 7 scores separately whether an operator offers its own deposit cap, cooling-off and self-exclusion in the account.

The boundary, and why crypto operators fall outside it

The licence requirement does not depend on the payment method. An operator needs a Gambling Commission licence to provide gambling to people in Great Britain, under section 33 of the Gambling Act 2005 as extended to remote operators abroad by section 36, and the Commission's guidance is that a licence from another country does not permit it. Crypto operators are, with one exception in our wider list, licensed elsewhere, and so they are outside the licence and outside the scheme by the same fact.

The Commission permits its licensees to accept crypto on conditions, and we found no primary source confirming a licensee currently runs a crypto cashier; so in practice the boundary of GamStop runs between fiat casinos licensed here and crypto operators licensed abroad. The Commission's executive director has said that part of the audience leaving licensed sites does so to use crypto, which is the regulator naming the asset as a reason players cross the boundary, not a reason the boundary moves.

The Commission's view of operators marketed as outside the scheme

The phrase "not on GamStop" is a marketing description of an operator's licence. The Commission's executive director, speaking at an industry conference in January, described sites marketed that way as illegal online casinos targeting people who have chosen to self-exclude. The Commission's research into illegal online gambling found that search engines are the main route by which players reach such sites, and that players who had self-excluded through GamStop reached them disproportionately through social media.

The Commission's enforcement figures describe what happens to such operators from the regulator's side: in the nine months from April to December of last year it issued 592 cease-and-desist notices, had 203,571 URLs removed and saw 627 sites closed or geoblocked. An operator in our list may become unreachable from the United Kingdom without notice, with a balance inside it, which is one more reason the scale puts forty points on the licence.

Our pages do not describe any operator as "not on GamStop" and do not suggest a route around the scheme. The advertising rules we follow bar presenting gambling as a solution to financial problems or targeting it at vulnerable people, and a self-excluded reader is the clearest case of the second.

The tools that reach beyond the scheme

GamStop stops at the licence; three tools do not.

A device-level blocker. Gamban and BetBlocker block gambling sites and apps on the devices they are installed on, whatever the operator's licence, and both are free to UK residents. They are the only external tool that reaches a crypto operator, and the scheme's own support page points to them.

The operator's own limit tools. A deposit cap, a cooling-off period and self-exclusion in the account area, offered by a licensee as a licence condition and by an overseas operator at its discretion. Criterion 7 scores their presence, all or nothing, because a limit that has to be requested from support is not a limit.

The limit set before the asset is bought. The crypto route has no bank between the player and the cashier: bank gambling blocks act on card payments to gambling merchants, and a crypto route shows the bank a payment to an exchange and nothing after it. The amount decided before the purchase, bought and no more, is the one limit that exists at every stage of the route regardless of the operator.

How the boundary shows on the cards

The cards do not carry a GamStop field, because the field would duplicate the regulator line: every operator whose card shows a Gambling Commission licence is inside the scheme, and every operator whose card shows anything else is outside it.

What the cards do carry is the protection-tools field under criterion 7, which records whether the operator offers a deposit cap, a cooling-off period and self-exclusion in the account without a request to support. For a licensee the field is full by licence condition. For an overseas operator it is the only self-exclusion that exists, and it binds the operator only as far as its own terms do.

A reader who wants to know whether an operator is on GamStop therefore reads the regulator line and nothing else. A reader who wants to know what the operator offers instead reads criterion 7. The two are kept apart on the cards for the same reason they are kept apart on this page: one is the scheme, and the other is the operator's substitute for it, and a substitute that the operator can withdraw is not the same thing as a scheme the operator cannot leave.

For a reader who has self-excluded

This page has one thing to say to a reader registered with GamStop who has arrived at a crypto operator: it is outside the scheme you joined, not a way round it, and the Commission's description of operators marketed on that basis is the only description this page will give. The scheme's support page lists Gamban and BetBlocker as free device blockers and gives a number for the betting-shop scheme.

The National Gambling Helpline, run by GamCare, is free, confidential and open at any hour on 0808 8020 133, by phone and by chat; GambleAware lists local services; for debt, StepChange on 0800 138 1111 and National Debtline on 0808 808 4000 give free advice. You must be 18 or over to gamble in Great Britain.

Sources

• GamStop, about, register, corporate and support pages
• Gambling Commission, LCCP (3.5.5)
• Gambling Act 2005, sections 33 and 36
• Gambling Commission, how we tackle illegal gambling
• Gambling Commission, blockchain technology and crypto assets
• Gambling Commission, ICE speech on illegal gambling
• Gambling Commission, blocking gambling transactions
• Gambling Commission, organisations that can help
• CAP Code section 16