France Blocked Polymarket After 578,751 French Visits in a Month

On 16 July 2026 the president of the Autorité nationale des jeux, France's gambling authority, ordered French internet providers to block access to Polymarket. In its communiqué the next day the ANJ said that this site, with particularly high audiences, promotes an illegal offer of gambling.

The authority put numbers on the audience: 578,751 visits from France in June 2026 and 205,057 unique visitors. The home page, which shows live odds on events open to betting, is a major vehicle for promoting Polymarket's offers, the ANJ wrote, although its activity is not authorised in France. It said it had blocked 1,290 URLs in 2025 under the same power.

The ANJ first looked at polymarket.com in November 2024. After it approached Adventure One QSS Inc., the company behind the site, Polymarket introduced geoblocking to stop betting from France, the authority announced on 29 November 2024. It said then that the cryptocurrency payments were not the reason for its action; the reason was that the offers could amount to unauthorised gambling under French law.

On 24 February 2026 the ANJ said prediction-market platforms are illegal gambling sites in France, and that the main operators had geoblocked France at its request, except for users on a VPN. Its July communiqué says the geoblocking gave rise in practice to workarounds.

The July communiqué also says some bets on the platform appeared to have been distorted: bets on the weather revealed that weather sensors may have been hacked. The cybercrime section of the Paris prosecutor's office opened an investigation on 4 May 2026 and gave it to the French anti-cybercrime office, the ANJ said.

According to the authority, the case also showed that Polymarket's platforms available to French and European users had no identity checks on their users, known as know-your-customer checks.

The ANJ reminded that advertising an unauthorised betting or gambling site is a criminal offence in France, punishable by a fine of 100,000 euros. The same penalty applies, it said, to anyone who publishes the odds of unlicensed online gambling sites in order to promote them.

Polymarket's restrictions page, read on 21 October 2026, lists France as close-only on both its website and its API: users can close positions but cannot open new ones. The other national measures are in the Europe tracker.