GAMSTOP
GAMSTOP is a free British scheme that lets a person block themselves, with a single sign-up, from every online gambling website and app licensed in Great Britain for a chosen period of at least six months.
Definition
GAMSTOP is the national online self-exclusion scheme for Great Britain, operated by the not-for-profit National Online Self-Exclusion Scheme Limited. A person registers once with their personal details and chooses a minimum exclusion period — 6 months, 1 year, or 5 years — after which every operator licensed by the UK Gambling Commission (UKGC) must prevent them from accessing online gambling and from receiving gambling marketing. Since 31 March 2020, integrating with GAMSTOP has been a mandatory condition of every UKGC online operating licence, so one registration propagates across the whole licensed market rather than requiring the player to exclude at each site separately. The exclusion does not lift automatically when the chosen period ends: the person must actively contact GAMSTOP and complete a further cooling-off before they can gamble again, and the scheme has no effect on unlicensed offshore sites or land-based venues.
Worked example
Suppose a player in Great Britain decides gambling has stopped being affordable entertainment and registers with GAMSTOP, selecting the 5-year minimum exclusion. Within roughly 24 hours the exclusion takes effect across every UKGC-licensed operator: existing accounts are blocked, marketing emails and texts must stop, and any attempt to open a new account at another licensed site is refused. Five years later the block does not simply expire — to gamble again the player must contact GAMSTOP to deactivate the exclusion and then wait out a short cooling-off period, and if they do nothing the exclusion continues indefinitely. Importantly, GAMSTOP would not stop the same player from depositing at an unlicensed offshore casino or walking into a betting shop, which is why it is often paired with device-level blocking software and the separate land-based self-exclusion schemes.
Why it matters
For players, GAMSTOP is the single strongest control in the British market for taking a decisive break, because one registration removes access to the entire licensed online sector at once rather than site by site. For professionals, participation is a hard licensing requirement enforced by the UKGC: an operator that lets a self-excluded customer gamble, or that markets to them, faces regulatory action, so GAMSTOP integration, identity-matching logic, and marketing suppression sit at the centre of a compliant player-protection and CRM stack. It also illustrates the built-in limit of self-exclusion — it binds only licensed operators — which is a core argument in debates about the unlicensed black market and about extending protections beyond GB-licensed sites.
Related
Note: GAMSTOP is specific to Great Britain and to online operators licensed by the UK Gambling Commission; it does not cover unlicensed/offshore sites, land-based betting shops or casinos (which use separate schemes such as the Multi-Operator Self-Exclusion Scheme (MOSES) and SENSE), and other jurisdictions run their own national registers (for example Spelpaus in Sweden). The exclusion-period options (6 months / 1 year / 5 years) and the mandatory-integration date of 31 March 2020 are stable, documented facts, but operational specifics — the exact propagation and reactivation cooling-off timing (commonly cited as around 24 hours), registration requirements, and governance/funding arrangements — can change and should be verified against GAMSTOP's and the UKGC's current published rules.