How Payments Actually Work for Gambling in France: ANJ, Banks and Why Deposits Get Blocked

The law of 2 March 2022 gave the president of the ANJ a power that previously belonged to the judicial judge: the authority to directly order the blocking of sites that offer or advertise illegal gambling. The current procedure starts with a formal findings report from an authorised ANJ investigator, followed by formal notice to the site’s publisher and host to stop the illegal activity and block French access, before a blocking order follows if that notice is not complied with. The ANJ’s own data shows illegal sites most frequently visited by French users overwhelmingly offer exactly the games with no legal route online — roulette, video poker and blackjack. This direct blocking power applies to gambling sites themselves; it is separate from the ANJ’s broader strategy of engaging with payment providers and other intermediaries, which operates as regulatory cooperation and pressure rather than a power to order every provider to block every transaction.

A card payment to a gambling site runs through several links — the site’s payment provider, the card network, and the customer’s own bank — and any one of them can block the transaction. Transactions may be identified through gambling-related Merchant Category Codes (MCCs), and individual banks or payment providers may apply their own restrictions or decline policies, independent of any specific action the ANJ has taken against a given site.

A site operating outside the ANJ’s licensed categories gives a player no access to the Médiateur des Jeux, the mediation body available to resolve disputes with licensed operators. If a withdrawal is delayed, reduced, or simply refused, there is no French regulatory channel to escalate it through — the outcome depends entirely on the operator’s own conduct and, where relevant, the complaints process of whatever licence it holds elsewhere.

Within the categories the ANJ does license — sports betting, horse-race betting and poker — licensed operators are subject to ongoing ANJ oversight of their financial practices, and players retain access to the Médiateur des Jeux if a payment dispute cannot be resolved directly. That structural protection is specific to the licensed categories and does not extend to any site offering online casino games, regardless of what payment methods it displays or how legitimate its checkout page looks.

Since there is no ANJ licence category for online casino games at all, there is no way to point to a payment method at a specific casino site as safe or ANJ-compliant — doing so would imply a legitimacy the underlying offer does not have. This page explains how the payment landscape works in France rather than recommending where to deposit.