LadBet and GAMSTOP

GAMSTOP is the most effective tool available to anybody who wants to stop gambling online in Britain, and the reason is structural rather than technical: it sits outside every operator, so no operator can be talked into making an exception. LadBet participates in it as a licence condition, alongside the limits and the time-out and self-exclusion tools in your own account settings.

We are required to participate in it as a condition of our licence. We have no visibility of who is registered until a registration blocks an attempted sign-in, and no mechanism whatever for removing one.

What it does

Blocks registration and sign-in across every gambling operator licensed by the Gambling Commission to offer remote gambling to British consumers.

The scope

Every licensed online casino, sportsbook, bingo and lottery site operating in Britain, from the largest operators to a brand that launched last month. It applies from the moment the registration takes effect and it applies whether or not you had an account with a given operator beforehand.

What happens to an existing account

It is closed and any balance is returned. Open bets are left to settle and paid as normal. Marketing stops permanently. You do not need to contact each operator individually — that is precisely the work the scheme does for you.

How to register

Directly with GAMSTOP rather than through any operator. It takes a few minutes and costs nothing.

1. Go to the scheme directlyIts own website, not through a gambling site.
2. Provide your detailsName, date of birth, address, email and mobile. These are matched against operator records.
3. Choose a periodSix months, one year or five years. It cannot be shortened afterwards.
4. ConfirmIt takes effect within 24 hours and stays in force for the full term.

Give every detail you have used

The block works by matching your details against operator records, so an email address or a mobile number you have used at a site and not declared to the scheme is a gap in it. Adding every address, email and phone number you have ever registered with is the single thing that makes the difference between a scheme that works and one that half works.

What it does not cover

Worth being clear about, because assuming coverage that does not exist is how somebody ends up gambling on a site with none of the protections.

• Unlicensed sites. Operators outside British regulation do not participate, and they actively market to excluded customers. Those sites also have no complaints route and no obligation to pay you.
• Betting shops. A separate scheme covers premises.
• The National Lottery. Covered by its own arrangements rather than by this one.
• Physical casinos and arcades. Their own scheme again.

The first of those is the one that matters. A search for sites that accept excluded customers leads directly to operators with no licence, no adjudicator and no reason to pay a winning bet. That is a considerably worse position than the one the exclusion was taken to escape.

When it ends

Nothing happens automatically, which is deliberate.

It does not lapse quietly

At the end of the period the registration remains in force until you actively contact the scheme to end it, and there is a further seven-day cooling-off period after you do. Nobody is returned to gambling by the passage of time alone.

Before you end one

The honest question is what has changed rather than how long it has been. If the answer is only that six months have passed, that is worth sitting with. A call to 0808 8020 133 reaches people who will have that conversation with you, free and without any interest in the outcome, which is more than can be said for anybody writing this page.

What registering feels like in practice

Two small things nobody mentions and both are worth knowing beforehand.

It is not instant

A registration takes up to 24 hours to propagate across every operator, so an account may still open during that window. That is a gap in the mechanism rather than a loophole to use, and the bank-level block below closes it in the meantime.

Marketing stops too

Not just access. Operators are prohibited from marketing to anyone registered, so the emails and the push notifications stop as well as the sign-in. For a lot of people that second effect matters as much as the first.

Alongside GAMSTOP

Two things that make a registration considerably harder to work around, and both are outside gambling entirely.

A gambling block with your bank stops payments at the card level before they reach any operator, licensed or not, which closes the unlicensed-site gap the scheme cannot. Blocking software on your devices does the same at the browser level. Together with a GAMSTOP registration those three cover the routes that actually get used, and none of them depends on a gambling company doing the right thing.

If somebody close to you mentions it, that is always worth a listen. Support is free and confidential on 0808 8020 133, every single day of the year, including this one. You have to be 18 to bet at all.