Responsible gambling in France

The Autorité nationale des jeux — the ANJ — is an independent authority reporting to Parliament. It was created by the order of 2 October 2019, taking over and widening the remit of ARJEL, which had regulated online gaming since 2010.

It licenses three online categories and no others: sports betting, horse race betting, and circle games, which in practice means poker. Alongside that it supervises the two exclusive-rights operators, FDJ and PMU, and oversees the responsible gambling policy of land-based casinos.

The ANJ states the consequence itself: in France all online casino sites are illegal, and an international online casino licence has no recognised legal value there. Any “best online casino in France” list is therefore a list of unlicensed sites, because there is nothing legal to compare them against.

Open the register of licensed operators and search the website address. Each entry names the licensed company, the sites it may run, and the categories it holds — so the register answers “is this site licensed” and “for what” in the same lookup.

Two extra checks. The ANJ publishes a blacklist of prohibited gambling sites. And it warns that illegal sites display the “opérateur agréé” logo to look legitimate: if the logo is on the page and the site is not in the register, the logo is fraudulent.

The French scheme is called an interdiction volontaire de jeux — a voluntary gambling ban — and it is administered by the ANJ. Registration takes about fifteen minutes online and requires a valid passport, identity card or residence permit, with identity confirmed by document plus a dynamic selfie.

Its scope is broad. It bars you from entering a casino or a gaming club, from every online gambling site licensed by the ANJ, and from FDJ and PMU games played through a player account.

Three years is the minimum and it is the longest floor of the six markets on this site. After three years you may apply to have it lifted; if you do nothing, it continues. The procedure is strictly personal and confidential, and a legal guardian applying on someone’s behalf supplies their own ID and the guardianship decision alongside.

One consequence the ANJ flags and most guides leave out, because it is a real problem for a real group of people: the ban bars you from casinos and gaming clubs as a workplace as well as as a customer. It removes the professional approval those roles require, which means losing the job and being unable to be recruited into another one. If you work in a gaming establishment, that is the first thing to weigh, and a reason to raise it with a helpline before you file.

Joueurs Info Service is the main French resource: free advice on 09 74 75 13 13 from 08:00 to 02:00, seven days a week, anonymous and charged as a local call, with a chat channel and a self-assessment. It is run by ADALIS for Santé publique France.

Evalujeu is the ANJ’s own tool for assessing your gambling behaviour, and sits outside the treatment system entirely — useful if you want a structured look at your own answers before talking to anyone.

SOS Joueurs is an association running support and the SELF online programme.

Adictel appears in a lot of affiliate content as the French resource. It is a hybrid: free tools for players alongside services sold to operators, and no free player helpline. Worth knowing about, not the place to start.

The interdiction volontaire covers ANJ-licensed operators. Because the ANJ licenses no online casino at all, a site offering casino games to French players is by definition outside the scheme — the ban has nothing to bind it to.

That makes the French case the clearest illustration of the general rule. A registration that closes every legal door in the country leaves an unlicensed site exactly where it was. If you have filed a ban and a casino site still opens an account for you, that is the site telling you what it is. A device-level blocker works there; the ban does not.

For a dispute with a licensed operator there is a route: customer service first, then the médiateur des jeux once the operator has answered unsatisfactorily or twenty days have passed in silence. For an unlicensed site there is no equivalent, which is the same point from the other end.