France Orders ISPs to Block Polymarket as an Illegal Gambling Site
France ordered internet providers to block Polymarket, calling the prediction market illegal betting, not a financial venue.
France's gambling regulator told the country's internet service providers to block Polymarket on July 16, ruling that the prediction market is an illegal betting site rather than a financial trading venue. The Autorité Nationale des Jeux had already banned financial transactions on the platform in November 2024. French users ignored it. A VPN was enough.
Traffic and odds
The fight is over a definition. Polymarket calls itself a market. France calls it gambling, and gambling without a French license is illegal. Polymarket still pulled 578,751 visits from 205,057 unique visitors in the country in June, according to Similarweb data the regulator cited, a crowd for a service that was supposed to be off-limits. The homepage stayed live the whole time, showing real-time odds on events open to betting, and the ANJ zeroed in on exactly that. The display, it wrote, "serves as a major channel for disseminating and promoting Polymarket's offerings, even though the site's operations are not authorized in France." Providers that ignore the order face fines of up to 100,000 euros ($114,380). The penalty targets the providers, not the punters.
Sensors and a whale
Two episodes hardened the case. France's weather service, Météo-France, complained about a tampered temperature sensor tied to weather-based bets, and on May 4 the Paris prosecutor's cybercrime unit opened an investigation. A national weather agency and a crypto betting site now share a criminal case. The regulator also reached back to "Fredi9999," the French trader who moved U.S. election odds with multimillion-dollar positions in 2024. The ANJ had been building to this since February 2026, when it reclassified prediction markets as illegal gambling, citing addictive mechanics and the absence of stake limits or self-exclusion tools.
A widening blacklist
France is late, not early. Polymarket is now restricted in more than 30 jurisdictions. Switzerland cut it off in November 2024, Poland, Singapore and Belgium followed in early 2025, and Portugal moved in January 2026. Spain issued a temporary block in May pending a probe. The bans now stretch across Europe, Asia and Latin America, and France alone blocked 1,290 gambling-related URLs last year.
Polymarket did not immediately respond to CoinDesk's request for comment.
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