Reporting
How to report a gambling website
Five destinations, five different outcomes — and a plain statement of the one thing none of them is for.
In short
Report the site to the gambling regulator of the market it is targeting. That route produces intelligence and enforcement against the operator — not your money back. Five of the six regulators studied here state that they do not decide a player’s dispute; the sixth, Malta’s, takes player complaints into its own Player Support Unit. Money runs on a separate track: the operator’s own complaints procedure, then whatever dispute-resolution or court route the licence provides. Suspected fraud, an advertising breach and a disputed payment each go somewhere different again.
Five routes, and what each one achieves
“Reporting a gambling website” covers five actions with five destinations and five outcomes. Decide which one you are doing before you write anything.
| Route | Use it for | What it achieves | What it does not do |
|---|---|---|---|
| Gambling regulator | Unlicensed operation in your market; a licensee breaking its rules; impersonation of a licensee | Supervision, prohibitions, penalties, cease-and-desist and disruption work, police referrals | Decide your dispute or order the operator to pay you |
| Consumer-protection or redress body | A money dispute where no gambling-specific scheme exists | An assessment — a recommendation in Sweden, a legal decision from Denmark’s Consumer Complaints Board | Exist everywhere; powers differ sharply by jurisdiction |
| Police or a national fraud service | Suspected criminal fraud, not a commercial disagreement | A criminal file; Sweden and Denmark report unlicensed operators themselves | Work as a refund service, or keep you updated |
| Payment provider | An unauthorised payment, or a fee demanded before winnings are released | Whatever your own provider’s dispute process allows | Anything this page can describe — see below |
| Advertising route | An advert for an unlicensed operator, or one breaching the rules | Media outlets asked to stop carrying it; escalation to police in Denmark | Address anything about your own account |
One situation can belong in two rows at once — an unlicensed site that also took your money is both a regulatory report and a payment matter. They remain separate submissions.
What a report will not do
- You will usually not be told what happened. Denmark states that you “will generally not be informed if we decide to take further action.” Great Britain’s confidential service cannot give feedback in case the information results in an investigation — action taken against a business appears in its public registers instead.
- Reports and complaints do not substitute. That same Commission service states plainly that complaints received by it will not be processed.
- Anonymity may not survive the details you give. Denmark cannot process a complaint anonymously where you provide information identifiable as you.
What reports feed is visible in the enforcement record. A Gambling Commission blog post of 21 October 2024 described its work since April 2024: over 750 cease-and-desist and disruption notices — 259 to operators, 189 to advertisers — over 78,000 URLs referred to Google with 50,000 removed, and 255 websites taken down. Those figures were nearly two years old at our review date and are recorded as what that post said, not as a current position.
What each regulator does with a report
The six regulators examined diverge on what happens next — and on whether any public list of unauthorised sites comes out of it.
| Authority | What it says it does with reports | Standing list naming unauthorised sites |
|---|---|---|
| Gambling Commission (Great Britain) | Runs a confidential reporting service covering unlicensed operation, underage gambling and money-laundering concerns; publishes action taken against a business in its public registers. Issues cease-and-desist and disruption notices, and can prosecute in England and Wales — in Scotland that rests with the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service. | None located A display obligation instead: licensed status, account number, and a Commission-supplied link to the licensee’s own register record |
| Malta Gaming Authority | Publishes a standing list of unauthorised URLs and notices naming websites that impersonate its licensees; directs the public to its official Licensee Register. | Yes The unauthorised-URLs list, plus individual impersonation notices |
| Kansspelautoriteit (Netherlands) | Says reports help it judge whether more people have the same complaints, informing investigation priorities; states it cannot solve your problem or mediate personally. Acts through fines and against promoters — affiliates, influencers, payment providers, internet providers — with search engines, social platforms, app stores, hosts and banks. | None located Disruption rather than publication |
| Spelinspektionen (Sweden) | Cannot pursue a dispute between you and a licence holder; says it can raise issues in a wider context but does not investigate individual cases. Uses prohibitions, which may carry a financial penalty, and reports to police and prosecutors. | None located Prohibitions recorded in the Supervisory Decisions Register under the decision type “Förbud” |
| Spillemyndigheden (Denmark) | Not an appeals body and cannot resolve disputes, but says some enquiries lead it to look further. Issues formal requests to cease, pursues court action to block websites, reports operators to the police, and asks media outlets to drop unlicensed gambling advertising. | None located Court-ordered blocking, and a label licence holders are legally required to display |
| AGCO (Ontario) | Reviews complaints for rule violations — about two business days for initial review, up to five weeks for a compliance review, three to six months or more when complex. Issues warnings, suspensions and monetary penalties. | None located iGaming Ontario publishes a directory of registered operators, carrying a warning about unregulated ones |
“None located” describes what our checks found on each authority’s own pages on 18 September 2026 — not a finding that no such list exists. No entry here describes a power to award a player money.
The usual rule is to complain to the operator first, with two exceptions. Ontario lets responsible gaming, possible illegal activity and advertising go straight to the regulator, instructing you to enter zero in the complaint reference field when you do. Great Britain’s confidential channel does not depend on having complained to anyone — but it is an intelligence channel, not a complaints channel.
Where to send it: Tell us something in confidence (Gambling Commission) (opens official website); Doe een melding over een kansspel (Kansspelautoriteit) (Dutch-language official page); Har du problem med en spelaktör? (Spelinspektionen) (Swedish-language official page); Have you discovered illegal gambling or illegal advertising? (Spillemyndigheden) (opens official website); Internet gaming complaints (AGCO) (opens official website).
Who publishes a warning, and what it is worth
The Malta Gaming Authority publishes a standing list of unauthorised URLs, stating it has no connection with the listed domains and that any reference on them to the MGA or to a Maltese gaming licence is false and misleading. A notice dated 16 July 2026 recorded that it had “observed a pattern of websites impersonating MGA-licensed operators and misleading consumers into believing that they are licensed, regulated or otherwise authorised by the Authority.” That is a warning list, not a blocked-domain list; the MGA does not claim the domains are technically blocked. Its entries carried notice dates from roughly 2006 to 2026, and the page itself showed no last-updated date.
Great Britain does the inverse. Rather than naming bad sites, it obliges good ones to identify themselves: the technical requirements are explicit that the Commission-supplied link must reach the licensee’s own register record, not the Commission’s home page. A badge linking nowhere, or to a regulator’s front page, is inconsistent with the rule.
Fraud, the police, and advance-fee demands
Regulators take the criminal route themselves. Sweden informs police and prosecutors of its suspicions, mainly through police reports; Denmark’s escalation path includes reporting operators to the police. In Great Britain the Commission investigates potential offences under the Gambling Act 2005 and can institute criminal proceedings in England and Wales, while in Scotland prosecution rests with the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service.
Adverts, and payment providers
An advertising report is a separate submission, and often goes to a different body from the operator report.
Payment providers sit inside the enforcement picture, but not as a complaints desk. What the sources document is regulators working through them: the Dutch regulator names payment providers among the promoters it targets and banks among its partners, and the Gambling Commission describes payment disruption alongside search-engine delisting. For your own transaction, one point holds regardless of provider — no demand for a fee to release a balance is part of any legitimate verification process. See KYC and identity verification.
What to include, and what to keep
Four authorities publish what they want in a report. The overlap between them is the practical checklist.
Identify the site precisely
Denmark asks for the domain name, or the name of the operator or media outlet, and the address where a physical location is involved. Ontario asks for the gaming site’s name and your player ID on it. Give the exact domain as it appeared in your address bar, not the brand name — impersonation trades on brand names being close enough.
Date and time everything
Denmark asks for the date you observed the illegal gambling or advertisement; Great Britain’s complaints guidance asks for dates, times and amounts. A report saying “recently” is materially weaker than one naming the day.
Attach the documentation
Denmark asks specifically for photos or screenshots. Capture the licensing claim, the terms you were given, the transaction records and the correspondence — before an account is closed and you lose access to all of it.
Carry your reference numbers across, and keep copies
Ontario asks for the complaint reference number the gaming site issued, where one exists; it is the thread connecting the operator’s process to the regulator’s. The Commission’s consumer guidance tells players to keep a copy of everything they tell the business — assume you will restate the whole matter to a different body later.
Common questions
Which regulator do I report to if the site claims a licence somewhere else?
The regulator of the market being targeted, and the named licensor as well. Malta’s authority publishes notices specifically about sites falsely claiming a Maltese licence, so a false claim is reportable to the regulator being invoked. Great Britain’s position is that a licence issued in another country does not permit an operator to provide gambling to consumers in Great Britain.
How do I show that a site is targeting my country?
Denmark is the only authority here publishing concrete indicators: a Danish-language site, Danish customer support, payment in Danish currency, domestic payment methods, registration fields pre-filled with Denmark or its dialling code, the option to sign in with a Steam or Roblox account, and marketing directed at Denmark. Those are written for Denmark and are not a test for another market.
I want to complain about the dispute-resolution provider itself. Where does that go?
To the provider first. Beyond that, Great Britain’s published material is unsettled. The Commission’s approved-provider page, last updated 15 January 2025, calls the Commission the designated competent authority for gambling under the 2015 alternative dispute resolution regulations; its page on complaining about a provider, last updated 19 May 2026, attributes approving and overseeing those bodies to the Chartered Trading Standards Institute under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024. We record both with their dates and have not resolved which governs today. Both agree on one point: neither body will overturn a decision.
Primary sources
Each link below goes to the issuing authority’s own website. Where a page could not be retrieved by our automated checks, that is stated rather than hidden.
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Action Fraud
Action Fraud – the UK's national fraud and cybercrime reporting centre
HTTP 403 Forbidden to automated access, independently reproduced — the whole site refuses automated fetches and no body was ever returned. Nothing about its reporting URL, telephone number, opening hours or geographic scope is verified, including whether Scotland is covered. A human must open it in a browser.Checked 18 September 2026 · bot-blocked
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Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario
List of Registered Internet Gaming Operators
Despite its title this page holds no operator data, no search box and no last-updated date. Its only outbound link goes to iGaming Ontario's Regulated iGaming Market page, not to the filterable Operators directory, which sits a further click away.Checked 18 September 2026 · reachable
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Federal Trade Commission
Fake Prize, Sweepstakes, and Lottery Scams
United States consumer guidance about prize and sweepstakes advance-fee fraud, including invented-authority names. Applying it to online casino withdrawals is interpretation and must be labelled as such.Checked 18 September 2026 · reachable
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Federal Trade Commission
ReportFraud.ftc.gov (fraud reporting service)
Loaded but returned a JavaScript-only shell with no readable content, so the intake form and its geographic scope are unverified. The destination is named on the FTC consumer page that was read successfully.Checked 18 September 2026 · js-only
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Gambling Commission
Display of licensed status: technical requirements
Gives the exact footer wording a consumer should look for, and explains why footers show a short account number: it is 'the first block of 6 digits, removing any leading zeros' where they exist. The Commission also states the footer link must go to the licensee's own register record, not to the register's home or landing page.Checked 18 September 2026 · reachable
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Gambling Commission
Illegal online gambling – Phase 1: exploring consumer pathways into using illegal gambling websites – Executive summary
Regulator research, not consumer guidance. Its central finding is that apparent credibility stops people questioning licensing at all, and that some users did not know they had used illegal sites.Checked 18 September 2026 · reachable
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Gambling Commission
Illegal online gambling: consumer engagement and trends – Identifying illegal gambling websites
Published 25 September 2025. This describes the regulator's own methodology for identifying illegal sites; it is not a consumer checklist and contains no logo or seal guidance.Checked 18 September 2026 · reachable
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Gambling Commission
Register of gambling businesses – full list
Browsable list with activity and remote/non-remote filters applied by an 'Apply filter' button. Query-string search parameters are ignored: five patterns were tested and each returned the unfiltered list, which a reader who does not notice would mistake for a result.Checked 18 September 2026 · reachable
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Gambling Commission
Register of gambling businesses (search)
The search field is labelled 'Search by business name, trading name, domain name or account number', so domain search is officially supported. Two caveats the register states or demonstrates itself: 'Domain names and trading names are provided by the gambling business' — the domain list is self-reported, not compiled by the regulator — and no Commission page defines what the status values (Active, Expired, Forfeited, Lapsed, Pending, Revoked, Surrendered, Suspended) actually mean. The search is form-driven: there is no link that runs it for you.Checked 18 September 2026 · reachable
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Gambling Commission
Unlicensed gambling: our approach to tackling unlicensed gambling
The regulator's own blog, by Chief Executive Andrew Rhodes, dated 21 October 2024. Listed for completeness: no claim in the research rests on it, and it is not a third-party news source.Checked 18 September 2026 · reachable
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iGaming Ontario
Regulated igaming market directory
A point-in-time snapshot, not a live register — the page states the listing is accurate as of 1 September 2026. It does carry a search box and operator and category dropdowns, correcting the original research note that it was browse-only.Checked 18 September 2026 · reachable
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Kansspelautoriteit
Kansspelwijzer — register of providers licensed to offer gambling in the Netherlands
The register on this page is an iframe served from the regulator's own prevention site. Do not use the search box in the page furniture: that is the Kansspelautoriteit's site-wide website search, which searches the regulator's site and not the register. Search inside the embedded register panel instead.Checked 18 September 2026 · reachable
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Kansspelautoriteit
Register of licensees — English explainer for the Dutch licence register
An explainer, not the register itself: it tells a reader to search the company name, website, app or licence number, and links onward to the Dutch register tool.Checked 18 September 2026 · reachable
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Kansspelautoriteit (Netherlands Gambling Authority)
Aanpak illegale online gokspelen
Dutch-language original. It references no public list of illegal providers for the Netherlands.Checked 18 September 2026 · reachable
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Malta Gaming Authority
Licensee Register — Malta Gaming Authority
The landing page a consumer arrives at, with two tabs: 'Licensee Register' and 'URL Checker'. Both tabs are iframes onto separate subdomains, so a plain HTTP fetch returns essentially only the two headings — the tools have to be used in a browser. This page is the only place the URL Checker's real address is exposed to the public.Checked 18 September 2026 · reachable
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Malta Gaming Authority
MGA Licensee Register — search application
A JavaScript application behind Cloudflare: a plain fetch returns only the shell string 'LicenseeRegisterFrontEnd'. Driven in a browser it offers exactly three fields — Licensee Name, Authorisation Status and Gaming Service — and displayed 'Last Updated: 18/09/2026 13:43', which is a data-refresh time, not a content-review date. The structural trap: Authorisation Status is a filter only and is not shown in the result cards, so a consumer who searches by name sees no licence status until they open the record's dynamic seal.Checked 18 September 2026 · js-only
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Malta Gaming Authority
The MGA publishes notice on websites impersonating licensed operators
Confirms impersonation of licensees and false references to MGA licences. It does not confirm copying of a regulator's seal graphic; do not conflate the two.Checked 18 September 2026 · reachable
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Malta Gaming Authority
Unauthorised URLs — Malta Gaming Authority
A static published list of domains the MGA has actively noticed, not a search tool and not a comprehensive blacklist — absence from it proves nothing. The page carries no last-updated date; the most recent notice date observed on it was 15/09/2026.Checked 18 September 2026 · reachable
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Spelinspektionen
Illegal Gambling — how the Swedish regulator acts against unlicensed operators
The regulator publishes no blacklist or warning list of unlicensed operators. Bans appear only in the supervisory decisions archive, and the authority reports crimes to police rather than investigating them itself.Checked 18 September 2026 · reachable
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Spelinspektionen
Licence and permit directory — English path of the Swedish licence register
Same register as the Swedish path and equally client-rendered. Filter labels, licence-type names and the Excel export buttons stay in Swedish even on this English page.Checked 18 September 2026 · js-only
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Spelinspektionen
Supervisory decisions — archive of Swedish gambling enforcement decisions
Read in a browser; a plain fetch returns a shell. Entries run from 2019 to 2026, so it is a historical archive and not a current-status view. Filter values stay in Swedish on the English page. Only this English path works — the equivalent Swedish path returns 404 after the June 2025 site relaunch.Checked 18 September 2026 · js-only
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Spelinspektionen
Swedish Gambling Authority — English section
The English section is a partial mirror. Key consumer pages — where to complain, illegal gambling, gambling problems — exist only in Swedish.Checked 18 September 2026 · reachable
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Spelinspektionen (Swedish Gambling Authority)
The SGA's situation report — online gambling outside the licensed market (PDF)
Downloaded as a 733 KB binary PDF but never parsed — no text was read and no claim on this site rests on its contents. Listed because it is the likeliest official Swedish source on people gambling outside the licensed market despite an exclusion; a human must open it before anything is quoted from it.Checked 18 September 2026 · reachable
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Spillemyndigheden (Danish Gambling Authority)
Danish Gambling Authority (English section)
The English section lives underChecked 18 September 2026 · reachable
/en-us. Search-engine results pointing at/en/...paths are stale and return 404. -
Spillemyndigheden (Danish Gambling Authority)
Have you discovered illegal gambling or illegal advertising?
Submission is via a link to the Authority's contact page, which neither analyst fetched, so that contact URL is not published here. The page also states a reporter will generally not be informed of the outcome.Checked 18 September 2026 · reachable
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Spillemyndigheden (Danish Gambling Authority)
Illegal gambling and advertising
No last-updated date. Danish DNS-blocking mechanics, the blocked-page notice text and all blocking statistics are unverified — the pages carrying them return 404.Checked 18 September 2026 · reachable
- Spillemyndigheden (Danish Gambling Authority) Public and players (Danish Gambling Authority) Checked 18 September 2026 · reachable
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Spillemyndigheden (Danish Gambling Authority)
Spillemyndigheden (Danish Gambling Authority) – home
Danish-language home page.Checked 18 September 2026 · reachable
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Spillemyndigheden (Danish Gambling Authority)
Spiludbydere med tilladelse (gambling operators holding a licence)
Danish-language list. A search function is present at the top of the page; no filter controls were observed and the result fields did not render for an automated fetch. The list excludes gaming-machine licence holders and game suppliers, which have separate lists.Checked 18 September 2026 · reachable
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Spillemyndigheden (Danish Gambling Authority)
The Danish Gambling Authority's label
Confirms the label is a legal requirement but is genuinely silent on the label's own text, on whether it links anywhere, and on misuse. No date shown. A mandatory label is not the same as a verifiable seal.Checked 18 September 2026 · reachable