France Blocks Polymarket as Illegal Gambling, Fines up to €100,000

France orders providers to block Polymarket access

France's gambling regulator, the Autorité Nationale des Jeux (ANJ), ordered the country's internet service providers to block access to Polymarket on 16 July 2026. Polymarket lets users buy and sell contracts that pay out based on the outcome of real-world events. The order requires providers to make the site unreachable from French territory. The ANJ classified the prediction market as an illegal gambling service, not a financial trading platform. The decision escalates earlier restrictions that many users had bypassed using virtual private networks (VPNs).

Regulator cites addictive design and missing safeguards

The regulator said Polymarket does not offer the safeguards required of licensed gambling operators in France. It pointed to the absence of stake limits and self-exclusion tools, which help users control betting activity. The ANJ also flagged the platform's addictive design and the real-time odds displayed on its homepage. The regulator treated that odds display as promotion of an unauthorised betting service. It said stronger identity and location checks would be needed to keep French users off the site.

French traffic to Polymarket kept rising

French use of Polymarket kept rising despite the earlier limits. The platform recorded 578,751 visits from 205,057 unique French visitors in June 2026. The ANJ first restricted financial transactions to the site in November 2024, when users still reached it through VPNs. In February 2026, the regulator reclassified prediction markets as illegal gambling under French law. That reclassification set the legal basis for the current block.

Promotion now carries fines up to 100,000 euros

Under French rules, promoting an unauthorised gambling platform is a criminal offence. The offence carries fines of up to €100,000. Those fines can apply to services that advertise or give access to the platform. In May 2026, the Paris prosecutor's cybercrime unit also opened an investigation into a tampered temperature sensor linked to weather-based bets on the platform. The order extends the ANJ's action from financial limits to a full network-level block.