GAMSTOP vs. Bank Gambling Block: How Can You Stop Gambling Online in the UK?

Two Different Systems

GAMSTOP is a website-blocking service. After you register, GAMSTOP sends your details directly to gambling companies that are licensed in Great Britain, telling them to bar you from gambling with them.

In contrast, a bank is a payment tool. When you contact your bank and ask for gambling payments to be blocked, you're not getting any gambling companies to ban you. Instead, banks stop gambling payments using the merchant category code (MCC) that identifies gambling transactions.

So a GAMSTOP block requests a gaming site to turn away a user, whereas a bank gambling block stops a financial transaction. It's a difference based on UK licensing versus payment routing. The focus and mechanisms are fundamentally different.

What GAMSTOP Does and Does Not Touch

Once you register and upload proof of identity, GAMSTOP sends your self-exclusion request to online gambling companies in GB. These companies are then required by law to enforce your self-exclusion.

But be clear: When you register on the GAMSTOP website, you're only excluding yourself from sites that are licensed in Great Britain. GAMSTOP doesn't exclude you from getting access to sites that are run in other countries, nor does it necessarily affect operators licensed outside Great Britain who accept British gamblers.

What a Bank Gambling Block Catches

When you call up your bank with your concern and they process your request to block gambling transactions, they're not communicating with gambling sites. Instead, banks stop the money from coming out of your accounts.

Gambling transactions are categorized according to how they're identified by the merchant’s registered business purposes, also known as an MCC code. That's also known as a merchant category code. Used by many companies to group and track like payments – whether buying a car, eating out, or gambling, says Danske.

Danske provides an example: if you ring Danske and arrange for them to stop gambling transactions, they stop them to any gambling site that uses the merchant category code 7995. Danske Bank says gambling sites using the 7995 code include all gambling and sports betting.

Where Each Tool Leaks

The GAMSTOP registry is open to all operators registered and licensed in Great Britain, but limited to those operators. Smaller iGaming operations, more particularly operators registered under lower-level licenses where there's not as much scrutiny, are less likely to join the registry. So the operator-coverage of a GAMSTOP block is imperfect.

For one thing, GAMSTOP won't block your payments to unlicensed foreign gambling sites, no matter how "foreign" the URL's domain is. If a gambling site is licensed in the United Kingdom, it's in GAMSTOP's scope.

Whereas for a bank, since it is not getting access initially to the gambling operator itself, it uses registry data to establish which sites and thus transactions should be blocked, and how. It's a different kind of block.

For example, you can see right on the Danske website an example list of companies that they claim they may typically block as a result of such a request - an interior list provided by a bank to their consumers that is probably not exhaustive, and which would need to be cross-referenced against each customer's own list of payments:

So the MCC system of designating a company for blocking relies not on the companies themselves being flagged by the UK gambling regulator, but based on whether the bank can confirm a company is a gambling payment gateway using their own method.

Why Gamers Use Both

Both blocks are designed to help those who feel they have a gambling problem to stop. For those who have personal registrations like a credit card that funds their gambling, blocking the payment may not 100% work as a solution, but it does stop the flow of money. They can still log into the GAMSTOP gambling sites, but can't make purchases.

As for GAMSTOP: approved companies will no longer send you adverts or invitations, and if they find out about your exclusion, they'll update your account accordingly. They also say that "limited information about your sign-up to GAMSTOP" is shared with some other gambling blocking systems:

The Practical Takeaway

So GAMSTOP is about altering an individual's web relationships with gambling companies in Great Britain that renew a license from the Gambling Commission. Bank gambling blocks are about reducing the amount of expenditures to gambling companies globally, either regularly or in bursts, reducing the inflow of money into the gambling system.

The two may work together. They may be equally effective. But in any event, if they fail, it may be because the two systems operate under different registries and definitions, serving different purposes to affect the gambling outcome.