Polymarket Faces Ban by France’s Gambling Regulator

France’s gambling regulator has called on internet service providers to block Polymarket.

The order from the Autorité Nationale des Jeux (ANJ), issued last week and flagged in a report Saturday (July 18) by CoinDesk, argues that the prediction market and others like it are illegal gambling sites.

“Because some of their addictive features are similar to those of regulated gambling offerings — but are amplified by the absence of the protective mechanisms found in the legal gambling market — the ANJ urged users to exercise caution,” the regulator said.

“Some of the bets offered on this platform appeared to be rigged: for example, bets on the weather revealed that weather sensors may have been hacked.”

The ANJ added that an investigation into this matter was launched in May and found an absence of know your customer (KYC) controls on Polymarket platforms available to French and European users.

The regulator said past restrictions had not kept French users from using Polymarket. The platform saw 578,751 visits from 205,057 unique visitors in France last month, the ANJ said, citing data from Similarweb. This was despite a prohibition on financial transactions imposed in 2024, with virtual private networks (VPN) letting users get around that ban.

In a statement to PYMNTS, a Polymarket spokesperson said the company was disappointed with the ANJ’s decision and could challenge via legal channels in France.

“Although we disagree with the ANJ’s action, France has demonstrated a strong commitment to financial and technological innovation, and our recent discussions with French authorities have been constructive and encouraging,” the statement added. “We will continue these productive conversations because we believe in a future built on innovation.”

The CoinDesk report noted that France last year blocked 1,290 gambling-related URLs and joined more than other countries in restricting access to Polymarket. These countries include Belgium, Germany, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania and Switzerland.

The news comes as prediction markets continue to grow in popularity and branch out into new areas. For example, Polymarket rival Kalshi announced last week that it had teamed with public intelligence company AppliedXL on a program that allows trading on clinical trial outcomes and Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulatory decisions.

“Drug development is one of the most important and most information-constrained industries on earth,” Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour said in a news release.

“The data that determines which drugs advance and which don’t is largely locked away from the people who need it most. Surfacing information is what Kalshi is for, and we are committed to doing it right: compliance-first, carefully scoped and built for the long-term.”

As covered here last year, the industry is “being driven in part by a market architecture that allows trading on a broad range of products, including finance, culture, politics, entertainment, weather and sports.”