France orders ISPs to block Polymarket after payments ban fails

The president of France’s National Gambling Authority instructed the country’s internet service providers to block access to Polymarket on July 16, according to a statement issued by the authority on Friday.

The order escalates France’s November 2024 action, when regulators barred financial transactions from French accounts to the site. Even that did not stop traffic. According to the ANJ, Polymarket drew 578,751 visits and 205,057 unique visitors from France in June, French media reported.

Advertising, by any means whatsoever, in favour of an unauthorised betting or gambling site is a criminal offence, with fines reaching €100,000 ($114,000).

– ANJ

France targets Polymarket at the network level

The move pushes French law enforcement from the transactional level to the network level. According to the order issued in November 2024, the French banks had to block any transactions to Polymarket, but people would still be able to access the website and see the odds. That reading pattern is what the ANJ now classifies as illegal advertising, per the regulator’s statement.

The novel legal theory here is that the mere display of market prices in real-time to French citizens constitutes solicitation for participation in an illegal gambling market. According to this theory, mere accessibility becomes the crime. The regulator said the site would remain blocked “for as long as authorities considered the platform noncompliant with the country’s gambling regulations.”

As of last month, Polymarket has generated over $1 billion in annualized revenue through activities predominantly based outside of the 33+ jurisdictions that have banned it.

One French whale case became a wider traffic problem

The France crackdown started with a single French trader who placed roughly $30 million in bets on the 2024 US presidential election. As Cryptopolitan earlier reported, the ANJ opened its formal investigation in November 2024, and Polymarket responded by implementing IP-based geo-blocking that displays a restricted-jurisdiction notice to French users. Bettors kept accessing the platform through VPNs.

France’s national weather agency Meteo-France filed a criminal complaint in April 2026 after one of its weather probes was hacked in an attempt to manipulate weather-related bets on Polymarket.

Similar concerns are running through parallel enforcement in the US, where a soldier was recently charged with using classified information about the January operation to capture former Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro to place bets on prediction markets, allegedly netting more than $400,000.

The White House said Thursday it suspended a teleprompter operator over allegations of placing prediction market bets.

US regulators protect Kalshi as Europe blocks Polymarket

France’s escalation occurs three days after the CFTC used its emergency powers to trump a decision by a Michigan state court to void the executed trades of Kalshi. The two sets of regulatory approaches to prediction markets have officially diverged.

France, Spain, Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Switzerland, Brazil, Indonesia, Singapore, South Korea, and Japan have moved to block or restrict access, per Cryptopolitan’s June coverage of the FIFA World Cup crackdown.

The US Commodity Futures Trading Commission has moved the opposite direction, defending federally registered prediction platforms from state-level enforcement while writing new rules to expand event-contract trading.

Polymarket finds itself on that dividing line.

The legal jurisdiction of Polymarket is getting narrower, but at the same time, its profits are growing. It was this very contradiction that French regulators found to be unreasonable in the Friday ruling: the website was still making money and attracting French users without using French payment systems.

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