Non-GamBan Casino: How Device Blocking Works and the Five Steps That Make It Hold

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• Leave the blocker exactly where it is. Do not sign out and do not uninstall. A single site slipping past a list of more than 61,000 addresses is a missing entry, not a broken tool, and the software is deliberately awkward to remove during a subscription precisely so that an impulse has to wait.
• Send the address in, and it closes for everybody. GamBan’s support address, support@gamban.com, goes to the team that maintains the list. Once a domain is added it stops loading for every subscriber rather than only for you, which turns your worst ten minutes into somebody else’s protection.
• Register with Gamstop as well, if you have not. One free form closes your account at roughly 350 operators holding a British licence, for six months, a year or five years, and it has been compulsory for them to honour it since 31 March 2020. The blocker works on your devices; the register works on your accounts.
• Turn the gambling block on inside your banking app. It declines card payments carrying merchant code 7995, the gambling code, and most banks now carry the setting. Choose the longest cooling-off period available, because the wait is the part that does the work.
• Then tell somebody and ring the helpline. Dialling 0808 8020 133 costs nothing from a UK phone and somebody picks up whatever the hour, while GamCare runs a live chat for anyone who would rather type than speak. A tool cannot answer back. A person can.

The one rule to carry: every layer here covers something the others miss, so the answer to a gap is always another layer, never a smaller set of them.

Five steps that make the blocking hold

Work through these in order. The first two take about ten minutes between them and close the great majority of what is still open; the last three take a little longer and are the ones that keep holding in six months.

1. Put the blocker on every device, not the main one. The software protects the phones, tablets and computers it is actually installed on, which is why the plans come sized for a single device, for three of them, or for more. Walk round the house and count the screens that can open a browser: the work laptop, the old tablet in a drawer, the spare phone, the one the children use. Any screen left out is the screen you will reach for.
2. Add the register, because it works where the software cannot. Gamstop is free, takes a few minutes and closes every account at every operator holding a Commission licence for the period you choose, whichever device you log in from and whoever else’s wifi you are using. It is the only layer that follows your name rather than your hardware.
3. Close the payment route. A gambling block in your banking app refuses card payments carrying merchant category code 7995, and most high-street banks now carry the setting. Pick the longest cooling-off period on offer, add a bar on phone-bill charges with your mobile network while you are at it, and the quickest routes to funding an account are shut.
4. Report anything that loads, the same day. If a gambling page opens through the blocker, email the address to support@gamban.com so it goes on the list. If the site is one that should have refused you because it holds a British licence, that is a separate failure and Gamstop’s own complaints page is where it goes, because a licensee that lets a self-excluded customer through has breached its licence and will be chased for it.
5. Tell one person, and book the conversation. Ring 0808 8020 133 or open GamCare’s live chat, tell somebody close to you what you have set up, and keep the safer play page somewhere you can find it again. The blocker itself can be paid for through a support service referral at no charge to you, which matters if a lapsed subscription is the reason anything got through in the first place.

How a device blocker actually stops a page loading

Understanding the mechanism makes the rest of this page make sense, and it also explains why the software behaves the way it does when something slips through. GamBan is a commercial product, sold by subscription from gamban.com and backed by several British gambling charities, GamCare and the Gordon Moody Association among them. Three levels of blocking run at once, which is why no single trick undoes it.

The first level is the name lookup. Every time a device opens an address it first asks a directory to turn that name into a number, and the blocker routes those questions through its own filter. If the name is on the list, the question gets no useful answer and the browser shows an error instead of a casino. The second level is the address itself: even where a name resolves some other way, a connection to a known gambling server can be refused at the point where it leaves the device. The third is apps, on both of the major mobile systems, identified by their package names, their signatures and the addresses they talk to, so a casino app is stopped from installing or from running.

Two consequences follow, and they are the honest shape of the thing. Because the filtering happens on your side rather than inside each casino, the software can in principle refuse any gambling site anywhere, whatever licence it holds or does not hold. And because it works from a list, it can only refuse what the list knows about. A domain registered last week is a domain nobody has catalogued yet, and that lag is the entirety of the gap this search is poking at. The list is maintained continuously and had passed 61,000 entries by October 2026, with heavily advertised sites picked up quickly, so the gap is narrower and shorter-lived than the phrase non-GamBan casino implies.

The last design decision is the one people complain about and then thank it for. On a computer the software integrates deeply enough that casual removal is difficult, and it is built to be hard to uninstall while the subscription is live. That is not an oversight. It is the same logic as the cooling-off period on a bank block: putting effort and delay between an impulse and a gambling site is most of what any of these tools do.

Where each layer reaches, and where it stops

People often treat the blocker and the register as two versions of the same idea, and they are not. One works on hardware and one works on accounts, and a bank block works on money, so each of them reaches somewhere the others cannot. Laid out side by side, the overlaps and the holes become obvious.

Read down the columns and the division of labour is clear. A device blocker is the only one of the three that reaches an offshore website at all, because the casino never has to cooperate: the refusal happens before the request leaves your machine. A Gamstop registration is the only one that follows you to a device you have not set up, since it closes the account rather than the connection, though it reaches only operators holding a British licence, roughly 350 of them. A bank gambling block is the only one that works on the money rather than the page, which is why it still catches a payment to a site neither of the other two has heard of.

Read across the rows and the case for using all three at once writes itself. A British-licensed casino is covered three times over, which is why a licensed site is the hardest thing in the world to reach once you have set this up. An offshore domain already catalogued is refused on the device and usually refused at the till. An offshore domain that is too new to be listed is the one row where a page can still open, and it is also the row where the bank block and the conversation carry the weight until the address is reported and added.

The bottom row is the one worth staring at. A screen in the house with nothing installed on it is outside the blocker entirely, and that is not a flaw in the software, it is arithmetic: it protects what it is installed on. Your accounts are still shut by the register and your card is still refused by the bank, but the page will load, and for somebody in a bad hour that is enough. Counting the screens is therefore the single highest-value ten minutes in this whole guide.

Every screen in the house, not only the one in your hand

Go device by device, because the gaps are rarely where people expect them. The phone in your pocket is almost always covered, since that is the one that prompted the decision. The gaps live in the drawer.

On a phone, install the app and sign in, and make sure it is the account the subscription belongs to rather than a trial that lapsed. On a tablet, do the same, and remember that a tablet shared with the rest of the household still needs covering even though it mostly plays cartoons. On a laptop or a desktop, install the desktop version rather than relying on a browser extension alone, and do it on the work machine too if work allows it, because an uncovered machine you use for eight hours a day is the largest hole on the list.

Consoles and smart televisions are the awkward category. Where the software supports the platform, cover it. Where it does not, do the manual version: remove any gambling apps, sign out of any gambling account the device has ever been signed into, and let the bank block carry that line instead. The same approach applies to a device you cannot install on because it belongs to an employer.

Then there is the arrival of something new. A replacement phone, a hand-me-down tablet, a laptop bought in a sale: each one lands outside every protection you have set up, and the moment to install is the day it comes out of the box rather than the day you find yourself holding it at midnight. Putting that on a calendar reminder sounds fussy until the first time it saves you.

What to do on the day something loads anyway

It happens, and it is worth settling in advance what the five minutes afterwards look like, because working it out in the moment is the hard way to do it.

Send the address in to support@gamban.com. It reaches the people who maintain the list, and once the domain is added it stops loading for every subscriber of the software rather than only for you. It is the one action available in that moment that helps somebody other than yourself, which is not nothing when the rest of the hour feels unsalvageable.

If the site that let you in holds a British licence, there is a second step. A Commission licensee that allows a self-excluded customer to gamble has breached its own licence, and Gamstop takes reports of that through the complaints page on its own site. This is not a theoretical failure: a settlement of £19.2m, announced in March 2023 and involving the William Hill group, covered among other things a case where hundreds of people who had self-excluded from another business inside the same group were let through anyway. Reports are how those cases surface.

Then dial the number. Short calls are as welcome on 0808 8020 133 as long ones, and ringing straight after a near miss is a better use of the adrenaline than anything else on offer. If the subscription had lapsed, ask about a referral while you are on the line, because a referral through a support service can cover the cost of the software and some NHS treatment programmes do the same.

What not to do is the shorter list. Do not sign out of the blocker to check something. Do not take the opportunity to look up whether other addresses behave the same way. And do not treat a single page loading as evidence that the whole arrangement has failed, because the other layers you set up are still standing and the gap you just found is about to be closed.

Bank blocks, card codes and the side doors

A device blocker closes the page and a gambling block closes the payment, and the second one matters because money can leave by routes a browser never touches. Online gambling paid by card carries merchant category code 7995, and a bank block reads that code and declines, whether the casino sits in Britain or anywhere else.

Two limits are worth knowing honestly. A block only bites when the merchant has been coded as gambling in the first place, so a payment dressed up as something else to the card network can slip past, which is the gap Starling’s wording is pointing at. And a block on a card does nothing about a coin: a crypto cashier is funded from a wallet rather than from a bank card, so it sits outside the card block entirely. That is one more reason the layers are worth having together rather than picking a favourite. The payments section sets out how each method is actually funded.

The honest price of the offer you were walking away from

This is the money part, answered straight rather than dodged. Offshore deposit packages are the one paid thing on this site. Each wants £20 or €20 to open, each asks 35x or 40x on the bonus, and each releases spins numbering between 150 and 500 across a run of deposits, with slots named as the games the wagering counts. Nothing about that is unusual. What it is worth is the question, and the answer is not good.

Take a £25 first deposit matched in full, so a £25 bonus, at 40x on the bonus. Before a penny can leave, £1,000 of stakes has to go through the game. On a high-volatility game returning 95.8%, every multiple of one costs 4.2% of the bonus, so forty multiples cost a great deal more than the bonus itself.

40 × £25 = £1,000 of stakes    £25 × (1 − 40 × 0.042) = −£17.00

That formula value assumes the requirement is finished, which most attempts are not, so we simulated it. The runs below put a £25 deposit and a £25 bonus into one balance at 20p a spin and ended either at the close of the requirement or at the first spin the balance would not stretch to. The Wild model is a high-volatility model returning 95.8% with a win on 15.0% of spins and a top prize of 12,000 times the stake; the Easy model is a low-volatility model returning 96.4% with a win on 39.2% of spins and a top prize of 250 times the stake.

The top row is the one on offer. Nine attempts in a hundred reach the end of a 40x requirement on a spiky game, and ninety end with the balance gone, the player’s own £25 along with it. The average of £36.69 is held up by the small number of runs that survive holding something large, and the middle run finishes on nothing at all, so the average and the typical experience are not the same sentence. The bottom row is in the table as a mirror and not as an option: it is what the same bonus looks like under the ceiling of ten times that binds a British licensee, and it is not available offshore.

The point of printing all that is not to help anyone pick a package. It is that the headline on an offer is an invitation to imagine the best row, while the arithmetic describes the row almost everybody lands in. A number you have actually seen is harder to be seduced by.

The same thing looks different again if you measure it in time rather than in pounds. We ran a plain £50 balance at 50p a spin on the Wild model, 100,000 sessions, with no bonus and no requirement attached, simply to see how long the money lasts.

Every session reaches 100 spins, because £50 at 50p buys exactly that many. After 200 spins 68.5% are still able to stake, after 300 it is 45.0%, after 400 it is 33.2%, after 500 it is 26.1% and after 600 it is 21.5%. The middle session ends holding 33p, which is to say it ends because the balance could not cover the next 50p. Across the full 600 spins the expected cost is £12.60, the average finishing balance is £42.76 lifted by rare very large wins, 14.6% of sessions finish on £50 or more, 9.3% on £100 or more and one in a hundred above £548.89. Those last two figures are the ones memory keeps, and the first ones are the ones that happen.

If you want to price a session on your own numbers rather than ours, the calculators below open on offshore defaults, which means a return lower than a British-licensed lobby would typically run and no ceiling on a requirement. The first prices an hour: 400 spins at 50p is £200 through the game, and at 95.8% that hour costs an expected £8.40.

The second prices the whole requirement from the table above: 5,000 spins at 20p is the £1,000 a £25 bonus at 40x asks for, and at the same 95.8% return the expected cost of producing it is £42.00. Set the return higher and the cost falls, set it lower and it climbs, but no setting makes a forty-times requirement a good trade.

Offshore names you may meet, given as context

Ten brands supply most of the advertising around this search, and they are listed here for one reason only: so that a familiar logo in a search result stops looking like a recommendation. This page does not say whether any particular address is on a blocklist, because that is not information that helps anybody, and the status of any individual domain changes continuously in any case.

What can be said applies to all ten at once. None is licensed in Great Britain. None consults Gamstop, so an exclusion you registered means nothing to any of them. None is bound by the ceiling of ten times on bonus wagering that has applied to British licensees since 19 January 2026. None has to verify who you are before you play, refuse a credit card, prompt you to set a deposit limit or offer a complaints process with an independent body at the end of it. And a complaint about any of them sits outside anything the Commission is able to act on.

Santeda International B.V. is the company behind five of the ten: Mystake, Goldenbet, Rolletto, Donbet and Velobet all trade on its Curaçao licence, all take cryptocurrency, and nothing caps the wagering any of them sets. Kinghills and NineWin each sit behind a Curaçao company that also runs a string of sister sites, and both are recent enough that no public record exists of how they handle a payout or an argument. RBGAMING N.V. runs Rainbet on a licence from Anjouan in the Comoros, built around coin deposits that no British cashier offers. Gamdom and Roobet both carry Curaçao licences, having come out of the trade in in-game cosmetic items before turning into crypto casinos; coins sent to either cannot be recalled by a bank, and no British regulator or ombudsman stands behind the payment.

A crypto cashier deserves one extra line on a page like this, because it is the part that sits furthest outside everything you have set up. A coin wallet is not a card, so a bank gambling block does not see it; a coin payment cannot be reversed once sent, so there is no equivalent of a chargeback; and the Financial Conduct Authority warns that anybody buying cryptoassets should be ready to lose every penny of it, which is the warning before a single coin reaches a casino. If you have installed a blocker to stop, a coin cashier is the single worst door in the building.

What the licensed market looks like by contrast is worth one paragraph, not as a suggestion to go there but as a measure of what is missing. bet365, Sky Vegas, Ladbrokes and Coral, William Hill and 888 Casino, LeoVegas and BetMGM, 32Red and Unibet, Betway, Grosvenor Casinos, Genting Casino, Casumo and NetBet are all connected to Gamstop, so one registration closes every one of them to you. PlayOJO and MrQ lay no wagering on a bonus at all. All of them check identity before play and none of them takes a credit card. If you have registered, every one of those doors is already shut, which is why advertising aimed at people outside Gamstop has to look abroad to find you. The jurisdictions behind those offshore licences are covered in the guide to casinos licensed outside Britain and the Curaçao guide.

Free help you can start in the next ten minutes

Software holds a line and people change a situation, and the second of those is the one that lasts. Everything in this table is free at the point of use and none of it requires a diagnosis, a referral or a wait.

A word about the landscape, because it changed recently and the names can be confusing. The GambleAware charity wound up on 31 March 2026, and commissioning of the National Gambling Helpline passed to GamCare, so the number above is untouched by it. Its website is still up, carried by the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities until at least March 2027, and the self-assessment tools and local service directory on it are worth using.

For the tools themselves: GamBan sells the device blocking described on this page, Gamstop takes free registrations and explains how long each period lasts and what happens at the end of it, and GamCare runs the helpline, the live chat and treatment services across the country. Using all of them together is the standard advice from the people who do this for a living, and the safer play page keeps the same list in one place with nothing to buy. The reason is the one this whole page is built on: no single layer should be asked to carry the entire weight.

Where these figures come from

Facts about the blocking software, the self-exclusion register, bank gambling blocks and the helpline come from those organisations’ own published material: the blocklist passing 61,000 gambling addresses and apps by October 2026 and its continuous updating, the plans sized for one device, three devices or more, the no-charge referral route through support services, the three blocking levels and the design decision to make removal difficult during a subscription, the roughly 350 Commission-licensed operators a registration closes, the exclusion periods of six months, one year and five years, and the helpline number and its hours. Merchant category code 7995 is the card networks’ own code for gambling. The bank figures, cooling-off periods and quoted statements are the banks’ own published ones, as are the mobile networks’ bars on phone-bill charging.

The rules and dates come from the Commission’s own material: compulsory participation in the register since 31 March 2020, the credit-card decision of 14 April 2020, identity verification before any play, the deposit-limit prompt, the eight-week complaints timetable ending with an independent body, and the ceiling of ten times on bonus wagering in force from 19 January 2026. The £19.2m settlement with the William Hill group announced in March 2023 is a published enforcement outcome. The warning on cryptoassets is the Financial Conduct Authority’s.

Everything simulated here runs on model slots of our own rather than on games anybody can play. The Wild model is high volatility, returns 95.8%, pays something on 15.0% of spins and tops out at 12,000 times the stake; the Easy model is low volatility, returns 96.4%, pays on 39.2% of spins and tops out at 250 times the stake. The bonus runs held a £25 deposit and a £25 bonus in one balance at 20p a spin and ended either when the requirement was met or when the next spin became unaffordable: 50,000 runs at 40x on each model and 100,000 at the 10x comparison. The balance run staked a plain £50 at 50p a spin with no bonus attached, 100,000 times, and reports the share still able to stake at each hundred spins. Values by formula come from E = B × (1 − W × (1 − RTP)), leaving your own deposit outside B, so they describe a requirement seen all the way through rather than the ending of a typical run.

Statements about brands are limited to who owns them, where they are licensed, how long they have traded and what has been published against them, and no claim is made anywhere on this page about whether a particular address is or is not on a blocklist. The offshore packages are described from their published terms as they stood in October 2026, which means every count here is dated rather than permanent.

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