Bingo Sites Not on GamStop and the Costs That Never Appear on the First Screen

Bingo sites not on GamStop are online bingo operators holding no Gambling Commission licence, so they are not part of the national self-exclusion scheme and cannot be. Joining one means the British protections — the ten-times wagering cap, the fair-terms rules, the approved dispute bodies — stop at the login page. The price sits in the small print.

The scheme's name is often typed "gamestop", a slip the word "game" invites.

Every bingo room sells the same thing: the chance that a few pence becomes a few hundred. What separates one room from another is never the jackpot graphic. It is who holds the licence, who adjudicates when the software misbehaves, and who pays when the operator decides the terms were breached. GamStop is a British self-exclusion register, not a wall around the internet, and a site outside the scheme is not hiding — it is simply licensed somewhere else, under rules written for someone else's market. The question worth asking about any of them is not whether the bingo is fair but what it costs to find out. The answer is nearly always buried in the terms, in a currency conversion, in a wagering figure, in a clause that turns a win into a credit note. This page follows that money.

For help at any point: the National Gambling Helpline, run by GamCare, is free on 0808 8020 133, 24 hours a day, every day of the year. In Wales the number given is 0808 2819 265.

How UK Regulations Differ for Offshore Operators

A bingo site licensed in Great Britain must be part of the national online self-exclusion scheme. That is not a courtesy — it is licence condition 3.5.5 of the Gambling Commission's Licence Conditions and Codes of Practice, in force since 31 March 2020, and it states plainly that licensees must participate in the national multi-operator self-exclusion scheme. Since April 2020 operators have also had to check their entire customer base against the register at least every 24 hours.

So a British-licensed bingo room cannot let a self-excluded person open an account. Not on the first attempt, not on the tenth, not under a slightly different spelling of a surname. The Commission has flagged the last of those itself: onboarding a customer with a middle name where a forename belongs creates mismatches with records held elsewhere, and that undermines the whole point of the scheme.

Offshore sites hold no such licence, so the obligation never attaches to them. The Commission's own position, published 21 October 2024, is that it is illegal for anyone to offer commercial gambling services to consumers in Great Britain without a Commission licence, including where the operator holds a licence in another jurisdiction. That is the operator's exposure under section 33 of the Gambling Act 2005, not the player's — the Act's general offences attach to those who provide facilities, not to adult consumers. But the practical consequence lands entirely on the player, and it is this: the machinery that would normally catch a mistake simply is not there.

Self-exclusion is worth stating precisely, because it is so often muddled. A GamStop exclusion blocks a person from all online gambling companies licensed in Great Britain. It runs for the chosen term — six months, one year, five years, or five years with auto-renewal — and it stays in place after that term ends until the person contacts GamStop to remove it. It cannot be cancelled early. Under the terms of use, auto-renewal can only be switched off during the last six months of a five-year period. An offshore bingo site is never a way round it; it is simply a site the scheme does not reach.

The Scale of the Offshore Market

Here is a figure that deserves more attention than it gets. Gambling Commission data covering June to September 2024, cited in a speech delivered on 6 November 2025, records 44.2 million withdrawals by customers of large online operators. Of those, 96.3 per cent cleared automatically. A further 3.5 per cent cleared within 24 hours. One-tenth of one per cent took up to 48 hours.

That is the standard a British-licensed bingo room is held to, and it is not merely convention. Commission guidance says it is unacceptable for operators to introduce friction when a customer tries to withdraw rather than when they deposit, and that where there are no regulatory concerns there is no valid reason to delay a payout. The LCCP does not set a fixed maximum number of days for a withdrawal, but licence condition 7.1.1 requires terms to be fair within the meaning of the Consumer Rights Act 2015, and licence condition 17.1.1 forbids demanding extra information at the withdrawal stage that could reasonably have been requested earlier.

The complaints data shows where this bites. Over a quarter of complaints reaching the Commission's Contact Centre concern identity verification — the classic pattern of documents being requested only when a player tries to take money out. Complaints coded "Withdrawals and/or financial transactions" fell from 2,416 in the year to December 2022 to 1,791 in the year to December 2025. Falling, but persistent enough that the Commission's Annual Report and Accounts 2024-25 still records withdrawals as the cause of most of the complaints it receives.

Scale matters too. Great Britain's gambling industry generated Gross Gambling Yield of £17.5 billion in the year April 2025 to March 2026, 4.4 per cent up on the year before; the remote casino, betting and bingo sector accounted for £8.3 billion of it. The Commission's analysis published 5 November 2026 estimates that among respondents who had gambled online in the past four weeks, 2.5 per cent had engaged with illegal gambling websites, with a further 1.5 per cent having done so in the past twelve months. H2 Gambling Capital puts the amount staked with illegal operators in the UK at £16.6 billion in 2025, up from about £5 billion in 2019. I would treat those two sets of numbers as measuring different things — one is behaviour reported by people, the other a modelled estimate — but both point the same way. The offshore room is not a rumour. It is a market, with a marketing budget.

Assessing the Value of a Gambling Licence

A licence is not a badge. It is a set of obligations with an enforcement arm behind it, and the difference between registers is the difference between how much burns when an operator breaks a rule.

Take Curaçao, where much of this market lives. The National Ordinance on Games of Chance took effect on 24 December 2024, making the Curaçao Gaming Authority the direct licensing and supervisory authority and replacing the old master-licence and sub-licence model. The legacy orange sub-licence certificates ended on 15 October 2025. The four former master licensors stopped issuing on dates across 2024 and January 2025. A historic /JAZ number on a site footer is, on the regulator's own statement, not proof of a current licence.

Then there is the money. A Curaçao B2C application fee is a one-time non-refundable €4,592, with €150 per ultimate beneficial owner. The total annual B2C fee is €47,450 — €24,490 to the National Treasury and €22,960 to the Authority. By contrast, Anjouan publishes €17,828 for B2C licence issuance and the same for annual renewal. A Malta Gaming Authority B2C licence costs a €5,000 application fee, a €25,000 annual licence fee and gaming tax at 5 per cent of revenue, against minimum paid-up share capital of €100,000 for Type 1 and Type 2 licences.

Those numbers are not a quality ranking, and I would be wary of anyone who presents them as one. They are a cost base, and a cost base tells you what an operator must earn back. A room that has to recover €17,828 a year from a small player pool has a reason to be creative about margins. The Anjouan case is more troubling still. An ABC News investigation published 31 December 2025 reported that Anjouan Licensing Services claims to have issued more than 1,300 gambling licences at around €17,000 a year, and that a former attorney-general of the Comoros described the entity selling those licences as "an illegal entity". The regulator has said in its own statement of 10 June 2026 that an Anjouan licence "is not, and has never been presented as, a universal authorisation to operate in every country in the world". That is an honest sentence, and it is also the whole problem stated by the seller.

What the Withdrawal Rules Look Like Side by Side

One row deserves a footnote. The reverse withdrawal ban matters more in bingo than the phrase suggests, because bingo balances are small and temptingly round. RTS requirement 14B states that consumers must not be given the option to cancel their withdrawal request, and it has been in force since 31 October 2021. In an offshore room, cancelling a pending withdrawal and putting the money back into play is a feature, not an accident.

Why Bonuses Are the Primary Marketing Tool

A new offshore room rarely competes on the game. It competes on the offer, and the offer is where the cost hides.

From 19 January 2026, British-licensed operators may not apply wagering requirements above ten times, and may not mix two or more types of gambling product in a single incentive. The Commission chose a cap rather than an outright ban precisely because it judged licensees would otherwise write terms preventing customers cashing out at all, and it said the limit "will take out extreme levels as some licensees currently apply up to 60 times wagering requirements". Six months earlier, the practice the rule kills was normal.

Offshore, the caps are written by the operator. Typical welcome-bonus multipliers run at 25× to 50×, with no-deposit offers at 40× to 60× and a cashout ceiling of €50 to €100. One operator's terms state that casino bonus amounts carry a 25× playthrough before any winnings derived from them may be withdrawn, and its contribution chart gives slots 100 per cent, table games 20 per cent, video poker 10 per cent, roulette 5 per cent and craps, live dealer and jackpot games 0 per cent unless stated otherwise. Read that last figure again. A player who spends the evening in a zero-weighted room is not making progress towards anything.

Three clauses do most of the damage.

Wagering requirements that count both sides of the ledger

Some terms express the requirement as a multiple of the bonus, some as a multiple of bonus plus deposit. If a room says a playthrough equals the bonus amount multiplied by the wager and separately states that the deposit is not included, that is the milder version and worth noting. The arithmetic still lands hard: a €50 bonus at 40× is €2,000 of play, and bingo tickets at 10p apiece make that a great many tickets.

Maximum cashout clauses

A clause limiting what can be withdrawn from bonus winnings — one operator caps it at 300 per cent of the credited bonus amount, voiding the excess — converts a jackpot into a rounding error. British rules forbid any maximum limit on withdrawals from the deposit balance, but the balance a bonus built is a different animal, and offshore terms treat it as one.

Maximum bet while wagering

Bet caps during wagering are the quietest trap of the three. One operator caps bets at €5 for regular players and €10 for VIPs and rejects anything above; another states the casino maximum bet per wager is 20 per cent of the deposited amount, with failure potentially meaning account closure and forfeiture of the bonus and any winnings generated during wagering. In bingo, where a player might reasonably buy a larger strip of tickets after a run of luck, that clause converts an ordinary decision into a breach.

The British rules on the same territory are not perfect, but they at least face the right way. Wagering requirements must not apply to play with the deposit balance; deposit and bonus balances must be displayed separately; and a player must be allowed to withdraw their deposit balance at any time, including while a bonus is pending. Small print that mixes the two balances into one number is doing work it should not be allowed to do.

Understanding How Self-Exclusion Works

This is the section that decides everything else, so it is worth getting the mechanics exactly right, because the two mechanisms are not the same thing wearing different names.

A land-based comparison makes it clear. Under the LCCP's ordinary code 3.5.2, a British casino's minimum self-exclusion period must be between six and twelve months, may be extended in blocks of at least six months, carries a one-day cooling-off period, and remains in place for a further six months at the end of the chosen term unless the customer takes positive action to gamble again. The land-based national scheme, SENSE, works the same way: the exclusion runs for its minimum period and then a six-month "Thinking" period follows, during which removal can only be requested in person at a casino by speaking to a manager, after which a 24-hour cooling-off applies. If nobody renews and nobody removes, the exclusion is removed automatically at the end of the Thinking period.

GamStop Online works the other way round, and it is the mirror image in the detail that matters. The exclusion runs for the chosen term. It then stays in place indefinitely — not for six months, not for a year — until the person contacts GamStop to remove it. Registration cannot be cancelled or deactivated during the period, and GamStop Online registrations cannot be removed early; the group's 2025 annual report devotes a section to its refusal to do so. If a person does not deactivate after the chosen period, the data is held through a further automatic seven-year self-exclusion period during which operators are told the person was previously excluded.

Two consequences follow. First, "not on GamStop" is never a technicality about a date. A site outside the scheme is outside it on the first day and on the thousandth. Second, the numbers behind the register keep growing: 117,756 new registrations during 2025, 561,983 active exclusions at the end of that year, and 614,738 consumers on the register as of July 2026, of whom more than one in two had opted for the maximum five-year term. The scheme is not a niche. The offshore bingo room's proposition depends on that population being large and persistent, and on at least some of it looking for a door that is not really a door.

Five Signs to Watch for When Assessing a Site

A list of bingo sites not on GamStop is easy to compile and nearly useless, because the label tells you nothing about which ones behave. What follows is the test I would apply instead. Each sign is checkable in a few minutes, from a chair, without depositing anything.

Their licence claim resolves to a real register entry

Click the regulator's seal if there is one and see where it goes. Curaçao's Certificate of Operation Seal must redirect to cert.cga.cw, and if the certificate behind it names a different domain from the one in the address bar, the site is displaying someone else's paperwork. A Curaçao licence certificate is not the same document as a Certificate of Operation. Anjouan states that certificates carry a unique number and a QR code linking to a public register, and that a certificate which cannot be verified there should not be relied on. On Kahnawà:ke, the Commission's logo program generates a Certificate of Good Standing for the specific site. A footer badge that is a picture file does nothing.

The terms name a dispute body, and the body exists

Anjouan requires licensees to designate an Authority-approved ADR provider and to publish its name and contact details in the player-facing terms; the approved list runs to four providers. Kahnawà:ke employs a full-time Dispute Resolution Officer. If the terms say disputes are "at the operator's sole discretion" and stop there, that is the answer to the question. In the British market this is settled: consumers can refer a dispute to an approved ADR entity free of charge if it is unresolved after eight weeks, and the Commission's approved list includes IBAS and eCOGRA, which have historically handled most gambling disputes.

Withdrawal terms are specific about days and fees

Find the word "pending". A real operator states how long withdrawals take, whether there is a processing fee, and whether a fee is cost-reflective. British guidance permits a cost-reflective processing fee but forbids one exceeding the direct cost of processing, and forbids any maximum limit on withdrawals from the deposit balance. Offshore, the pattern to watch is a withdrawal that is instant to request and slow to leave — that gap is where money goes back into play.

The wagering figures are stated before you deposit, not after you win

Check whether the playthrough multiplier, the game contribution weights, the maximum bet and the maximum cashout sit in the same document. If the contribution chart exists but the cashout cap is elsewhere, that separation is the design. Under the Commission's fair-terms guidance, simply including information in website terms and conditions is not sufficient — significant conditions must be prominent. Treat an operator that buries them as telling you what its priority is.

There is a segregated client account, and the terms admit the limit

Anjouan's published standards require operators to segregate player funds from operational funds. That sounds reassuring until you read the British version of the same rule, which is admirably blunt: money held in a separate client account does not mean customers get their money back if the operator becomes insolvent, and gambling businesses are legally allowed to hold customers' money in overseas bank accounts. British operators must pick one of three protection ratings — "not protected", "medium protection" or "high protection" — state it in the terms, and an operator rated "not protected" must remind customers every six months that their funds are not protected in insolvency. An offshore room that publishes no rating has told you which one it would be.

How to Check an Offshore Bingo Room Before You Deposit

Six steps, in order. Each takes minutes; together they cost less than an evening's play and tell you more than any review.

1. Verify the operator against the regulator's public register. Not the badge — the register, by the licence number, checking that the domain in front of you appears. The Curaçao authority announced on 7 October 2026 that its previous online portal would not return to service and that it is building an alternative way to verify licensed domains, which means a site's verification route may currently be indirect; that is a reason for more caution, not less. The reason: the Commission advises consumers to click through to the public register and check whether the site's activities and domain names match, because a licence number quoted out of context proves nothing.
2. Read the withdrawal section before the bonus section. Note the processing time, whether a fee applies, and whether a pending withdrawal can be cancelled. The reason: the Commission's Contact Centre has historically received around 2,000 complaints a year about withdrawal delays, and delay is where a small balance most often becomes a loss.
3. Write down the wagering multiplier, the contribution weights and any cashout cap. Do the arithmetic on a single figure — say a €50 bonus at 40× — before believing the offer. The reason: the British cap exists because multipliers up to 60× were being applied by licensed operators, and the offshore market is not bound by it.
4. Check the game contribution chart for zero-weighted categories. Bingo often carries a low or unclear weight, and live dealer, craps and jackpot games are frequently 0 per cent. The reason: play on a zero-weighted game contributes nothing to the requirement, so the advertised offer can be permanently out of reach through entirely normal behaviour.
5. Look for a named ADR provider and its time limits. Note the deadline for submitting a dispute — providers on the Commission's list may require submission within a period of not less than twelve months, and one approved provider will not take a dispute arising more than a year ago. The reason: the operator's own complaints procedure must be exhausted first; eCOGRA's figures show that 361 of 499 invalid disputes in one reporting year failed for exactly that reason.
6. Set the account's financial limit, and treat any currency conversion as a visible cost. Licence condition 6.1.2 has banned credit cards for gambling since 14 April 2020, and British operators have had to prompt customers to set a financial limit before a first deposit since 31 October 2025. Offshore, that prompt is optional. The reason: e-wallets charge their own conversion and withdrawal fees — one charges 2.80 per cent of the amount withdrawn with a minimum of €3.50 for bank transfers, another applies a 4.49 per cent foreign-exchange fee — and those costs come out of the winnings, not the deposit, so they are invisible at the point of decision.

A Note on No-Deposit Offers and Their Ceilings

Bingo sites no deposit not on GamStop is a search I understand, and the honest answer is that a no-deposit bonus offshore is a marketing cost with a ceiling stapled to it. Offshore no-deposit offers commonly run at 40× to 60× wagering with a €50 to €100 cashout cap, and the cap is the part that matters, because it defines the maximum the offer is ever worth whatever the screen says afterwards.

There is a specific combination to avoid. One operator's terms state it does not permit the mixing of no-deposit bonuses and deposits: if a deposit is made while a no-deposit bonus is active, the wagering requirements and the maximum cash-out of the no-deposit bonus still apply. In bingo, where the whole pleasure is topping up a balance mid-session, that is a rule written to be broken by accident. The same operator states that free bonuses are not to be redeemed consecutively, and that redeeming two or more no-deposit bonuses in a row can result in removal of subsequent winnings.

The British market reached a similar conclusion from the other direction. The Commission banned mixed-product promotions from 19 January 2026 — an offer whose prize is itself mixed, such as a free bet plus free spins, is non-compliant — and CAP guidance published with the Commission on 11 September 2025 requires significant conditions for free bets and bonuses to be clear, with full terms usually one click away online. The direction of travel in the regulated market is towards fewer clauses that can be turned against the player. Offshore, the direction is the operator's own.

The Licence Is the Cost, and Someone Pays It

Bingo is a small-stakes product with a high house margin, and that combination makes it unusually sensitive to overheads. A room operating under a licence that costs €17,828 a year has a different breakeven from one paying €47,450, and a different one again from a British operator carrying a 1.1 per cent statutory levy on previous-year Gross Gambling Yield — a levy that raised just under £120 million in its first year, ringfenced for research, prevention and treatment, and split 50 per cent to treatment, 20 per cent to research and 30 per cent to prevention. None of that is a moral argument about the site you happen to be looking at. It is an arithmetic argument about where the money comes from when the terms are finally read.

The enforcement picture is worth holding alongside it. Since April 2024 the Commission's Illegal Markets team has issued 3,140 cease and desist and disruption notices, referred 447,778 search engine URLs and secured 287,961 removals, with an average 32 per cent fall in engagement across 160 illegal sites measured after disruption. By method, registrar blocks and website suspensions produced an average 91 per cent fall each, ahead of geo IP blocking at 60 per cent, Bing removal at 52 per cent and Google removal at 30 per cent. In April to June 2026 the team referred 366 websites to search engines; in July to September 2026 it referred 1,835. The Commission itself says search engine removal makes a site harder to find without fully blocking access — an admission that the game is played at the margins of visibility, which is exactly where a bingo room with a low overhead and a generous-looking offer likes to sit.

The Costs That Do Not Appear on the First Screen

The single thing this subject turns on is identity verification, because that is where the money is either paid or quietly kept.

It works the same way twice, and then differently. On a first deposit at a British-licensed operator, the customer is identified and verified before being permitted to gamble — licence condition 17, introduced on 7 May 2019, requires information establishing identity including name, address and date of birth. Many operators verify electronically against credit reference and electoral roll data, in which case nothing is asked for and nothing appears to happen. Some run a hybrid approach, identifying the customer and verifying age at registration and deferring full verification until a €2,000 threshold of deposits or withdrawals is reached; that threshold applies to a single transaction and to transactions appearing to be linked, and linked includes activity within a single logged-on period.

Later, the checks come back. That is not a scam in itself. Customer due diligence is ongoing and may need updating when circumstances change, and for higher-risk accounts an operator must establish source of wealth. The warning signs are narrower and more specific than "they asked for ID". They are: documents demanded for the first time at the withdrawal stage when the operator could reasonably have asked earlier, which licence condition 17.1.1 forbids; account details that do not match because a middle name was used at sign-up, a mismatch the Commission has noted also undermines self-exclusion matching; and — the one that matters most — any suggestion that funds can be kept because verification failed. They cannot. Un-staked deposits remain the customer's, operators may not have terms allowing confiscation of money deposited but not yet staked, and the CMA's published position is that consumers are legally entitled to deposited money, winnings from money deposited and gambled, and bonus winnings where the conditions are met. One operator was required to pay £900,000 in October 2026 for, among other things, unnecessarily delaying consumer withdrawals and a term restricting customers to one withdrawal request at a time.

Offshore, none of that scaffolding exists. There is no licence condition 17.1.1, no approved ADR list to appeal to, no regulator that will open a file. The Commission is a regulator and not an ombudsman — it cannot resolve individual complaints or help anyone get money back. A site holding a Kahnawà:ke permit applies a rule of its own that is instructive about how offshore self-exclusion is treated: a player who breaches a self-exclusion prohibition forfeits any funds deposited or won to a third-party charity selected by the Commission. That is a serious rule and it is not a criticism of it. It is simply an illustration that outside the British framework, the remedy for a disputed balance tends to be forfeiture rather than repayment, and the player rarely comes out ahead.

Common Questions About Offshore Bingo

Are casino-style bingo sites really outside GamStop, or is it just the marketing?

They are genuinely outside it, and for a structural reason rather than a policy choice. The obligation to participate in the national multi-operator self-exclusion scheme sits in the Gambling Commission's Licence Conditions and Codes of Practice and applies to operators holding a Commission licence. An operator licensed only elsewhere is not bound by it, so no agreement it makes with players can be backed by the scheme itself. Check the footer, then check the register.

Do offshore bingo sites pay out, or do they find reasons not to?

Most pay most of the time, which is precisely why the pattern is hard to see. The Commission's data for June to September 2024 shows 96.3 per cent of large-operator withdrawals clearing automatically — a standard that exists because licence conditions and free ADR enforce it. Offshore, payout design is a commercial decision. The clause to search for is not "we do not pay" but "withdrawals are processed within X working days", followed by a pending period you can cancel.

What is a bingo site not on GamStop actually licensed under?

Usually one of a handful of regimes: Curaçao, where the new direct-licensing system under the National Ordinance on Games of Chance took effect on 24 December 2024; Anjouan, regulated under the laws of the Autonomous Island of Anjouan within the Union of the Comoros; Kahnawà:ke, whose Regulations concerning Interactive Gaming date from 8 July 1999; or Malta, though MGA licensees serving Britain normally hold a Commission licence too. Costa Rica is not one of them — it operates no comprehensive gambling licensing regime, and the "data processing license" sometimes quoted is not a licence in the legal sense.

Are the maximum cashout clauses on no-deposit bingo offers enforceable?

Enforceable is the wrong word; the question is who arbitrates. Offshore terms are contractual, and a capped bonus is usually drafted as a condition of the offer rather than a penalty, so the clause does what it says unless a dispute body reads it down. Anjouan requires licensees to name an approved ADR provider and expects complaints resolved within 30 days before escalation. Kahnawà:ke requires licensee dealings to be free of unfair or unreasonable terms. That is the whole apparatus — thinner than a licence condition, and much thinner than the British prohibition on any maximum limit on withdrawals from the deposit balance.

What happens to a bonus if the playthrough is not finished when the term expires?

It is typically removed, along with the winnings attached to it, and that is where the contribution chart does its real work. An operator that gives slots 100 per cent weight, table games 20 per cent and live dealer, craps and jackpot games 0 per cent is not describing a game library — it is describing the only route through the requirement. Bingo frequently sits at a low weight or in a category left unstated, which means a player's chosen game may contribute a fraction of what the screen implies.

Is it true that the regulator has been lenient with withdrawal delays?

No, and the enforcement record contradicts it. A £900,000 regulatory settlement was announced on 21 October 2026 covering failures that included unnecessarily delaying consumer withdrawals, a term restricting customers to one withdrawal request at a time, and manual review of every fifth or tenth withdrawal that led to extra information being demanded before payment. Separately, the withdrawal-specific complaints reaching the Contact Centre remain the single largest category. Leniency is not the pattern; the pattern is that the rules bite only where a licence exists.

Where does someone go if a bingo dispute cannot be settled?

For anything British-licensed, the operator's own complaints procedure first, then a free ADR provider from the Commission's approved list if it is unresolved after eight weeks. IBAS and eCOGRA handle most gambling disputes; IBAS recorded 3,721 domestic disputes in 2024-25 with an average completion time of 20 days and 100 per cent operator compliance with decisions in the consumer's favour. Offshore, it is the provider named in the terms, and the Commission has no jurisdiction. For help with gambling harm, the National Gambling Helpline is free on 0808 8020 133, 24 hours a day.

The First Screen Is Never the Invoice

Offshore bingo rooms are not illegal to play at, they are simply not licensed here, and the whole difference between the two regimes collapses into a single practical question: who bears the cost when something goes wrong. A British operator carries a licence condition that checks a customer base against the register every 24 hours, a ten-times cap on wagering, a fair-terms obligation, a free tribunal, and a pence-in-the-pound levy funding the treatment system. An offshore room carries a fee paid by 15 January and terms written to its own advantage. The comfort on the first screen is the same in both cases. The invoice arrives later, and it arrives by email, usually on the morning a player tries to withdraw.

Help is free and does not depend on where the account is held. The National Gambling Helpline, operated by GamCare, is on 0808 8020 133, 24 hours a day, every day of the year, with 0808 2819 265 for callers in Wales.