France Orders ISPs to Cut Off Polymarket After Two Years of Watching

Key Points

• ANJ used administrative blocking powers to order French ISPs to restrict access to Polymarket and its variants after a two-year investigation into parent company Adventure One.
• In June 2026 alone, Polymarket logged 578,751 visits and 205,057 unique French visitors, despite having a geoblocking system in place since November 2024.
• Nine European gambling regulators announced a coordinated crackdown on unlicensed prediction markets in June 2026; France, Spain, and the Netherlands have all taken blocking or penalty action.

Geoblocking failed. Formal warnings went unheeded. By Thursday, France’s gambling regulator had seen enough.

ANJ, the Autorité Nationale des Jeux, directed internet service providers across France to block access to Polymarket and its variant domains, citing the platform’s continued operation as unauthorised gambling and the public safety risks that came with it. The president of the ANJ exercised administrative blocking powers to issue the instruction, marking a significant shift from the geoblocking arrangement the regulator had originally accepted from Polymarket back in November 2024.

A Two-Year Watch That Ended in an ISP Order

ANJ’s attention first landed on Polymarket in November 2024, when the regulator began monitoring the platform operated by Adventure One, the parent company based in Panama. A formal warning followed, and Adventure One agreed to put a geoblocking mechanism in place to stop French IP addresses from transacting on the site. ANJ described the arrangement at the time as a resolution to concerns about illegal games of chance being offered to French users.

The geoblocking held, briefly. VPNs made it irrelevant. French users kept coming.

By June 2026, ANJ’s own data showed Polymarket had recorded 578,751 total visits from France and 205,057 unique French visitors within that single month alone. The scale of continued access, despite the technical barrier, gave the regulator grounds to pursue the harder enforcement tool it had not used two years earlier.

What the ANJ’s Notice Actually Said?

The blocking notice laid out several distinct grounds. Prediction markets remain unauthorised in France and are legally categorised as games of chance. ANJ stressed the addiction risks and the market integrity problems that unlicensed platforms create without mandatory protections in place.

However, weather-based markets also gained prominence. The betting contracts related to weather statistics brought up issues concerning possible manipulation of such statistics. This led to the opening of an investigation by the cybercrime division of the Paris public prosecutor on 4 May 2026. The Office Anti-cybercriminalité (OFAC) will be responsible for handling the case.

KYC was another failure point. According to ANJ, Polymarket failed to ensure that proper know-your-customer measures were taken to authenticate users’ identities as required by the laws of France as well as the European Union. Without doing that, Polymarket had no way of determining if its users were underage, self-excluded, or otherwise banned from participating in any form of gambling.

Secondly, ANJ found that Polymarket’s home page was against the rules set out in the law. This was because, on their home page, Polymarket displayed live dynamic odds for several sporting events, which constitutes a promotion, an offence in the eyes of French law. The fine for that offence can reach €100,000 ($114,347).

ANJ Has Been Here Before

The ISP block is not new territory for ANJ. In 2025, the regulator reported blocking 1,290 URLs linked to illegal gambling services. Administrative blocking has been a standard tool in ANJ’s enforcement kit for years; Polymarket simply became the highest-profile target it has applied the measure to.

The week before Thursday’s announcement, ANJ had imposed a €500,000 ($572,797) fine on an unnamed online betting operator, referred to as Company X, for failing to identify and support 29 high-risk players at an appropriate risk level. Six players were missed entirely; 23 were placed in the wrong risk tier. The regulator found the combined net losses for those players reached €683,355, while the operator pocketed net gains of €190,501.86 during the same period.

Two enforcement actions in the same week tell you something about ANJ’s current posture.

Europe Is Not Moving in One Direction, But Most of It Is

The Polymarket block landed a month after nine European gambling regulators published a joint statement announcing coordinated action against unlicensed prediction market platforms. Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Spain, and Switzerland all signed on, pledging information sharing, advertising compliance monitoring, and enforcement measures ranging from formal warnings through to account freezes.

This combined effort was very particular about the dangers posed by online casinos which ran continuously and without any required betting limits and breaks. The young people, the announcement said, were at more risk. Weak age and identity checks on unlicensed platforms compounded the problem further.

The coordinated stance reflected what had already been happening jurisdiction by jurisdiction. Spain’s gambling regulator, the DGOJ, imposed a temporary block on both Polymarket and Kalshi in May 2026, finding both platforms had been offering services without the mandatory administrative licences required under Spanish law. The block was expected to run three to four months pending a full investigation. Dutch regulator Kansspelautoriteit had gone further in February 2026, issuing a penalty order against Polymarket and giving Adventure One four weeks to cease operations or face weekly fines of €420,000, up to a ceiling of €840,000.

“Prediction markets are on the rise, including in the Netherlands,” KSA’s director of licensing and supervision Ella Seijsener said at the time. “These types of companies offer bets that are not permitted in our market under any circumstances, not even by licence holders.”

Ukraine moved in January 2026, when it ordered ISPs to block Polymarket through an order approved by the National Commission for State Regulation of Electronic Communications. It is the contracts related to the existing Russian-Ukrainian conflict that were mentioned by Ukraine’s gaming regulation authority, PlayCity, as grounds for adding Polymarket to the blacklist. Polymarket was already prohibited in over 33 countries at that time. The next country to join this list was Argentina due to a decision made by a court in Buenos Aires in March 2026.

Those countries which introduced certain limitations or banned Polymarket are: Germany, Belgium, Romania, Switzerland, Poland, Netherlands, Greece, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Ukraine and Czech Republic.

The Counter-Signal from Gibraltar

Not every jurisdiction is closing the door. Last week, the Gibraltar government unveiled a formal regulatory framework for prediction markets, positioning itself as a licensed entry point into the vertical. The framework adopts what Gibraltar described as an “activity-based and risk-based approach,” covering market integrity, participant protection, financial crime prevention, and operational resilience.

Gibraltar’s move stands as a direct contrast to the broader European enforcement trend. Where most regulators are blocking, Gibraltar is issuing licences.

Expert Analysis

The ANJ’s decision to go beyond geoblocking and push the block order directly to ISPs marks a meaningful escalation. Polymarket’s failure to prevent French user access, despite a two-year window to fix it, removed the regulator’s willingness to accept a technical workaround as sufficient. The Paris cybercrime investigation into weather-linked markets adds a dimension that goes well beyond standard licensing disputes; if OFAC concludes that certain markets were traded with information advantages, the legal exposure for Adventure One expands considerably.

The European picture, taken together, is not a regulatory conversation about whether prediction markets should be licensed. It is a coordinated effort to block platforms that have chosen not to seek licences at all. Nine regulators aligning in June, followed by France issuing ISP block orders in July, follows a clear sequence. What Gibraltar decides to do with its licensed framework will be worth watching, but the short-term trajectory for unlicensed operators accessing European users is narrowing fast.