Responsible gambling in Greece

The Hellenic Gaming Commission — HGC, in Greek Επιτροπή Εποπτείας και Ελέγχου Παιγνίων or ΕΕΕΠ — regulates online gambling including casino games and betting, land-based casinos, and video lottery terminals operated as OPAP PLAY. Its former domain gamingcommission.gov.gr now redirects to hgc.gov.gr.

As at 6 August 2026 its own player tool reported 18 licensed gambling operators and more than 14,000 websites on its blacklist. That ratio is the useful figure on this page: the licensed Greek market is small, and the unlicensed supply aimed at it is not.

The HGC sets the evidential standard for its own list in plain terms: publication of the list constitutes sufficient notice and proof that a licence exists, and only operators on the White List are licensed by the Commission.

The specifics of the licensing regime itself — the reform law number, the licence term, the first-issue dates — we could not confirm on an hgc.gov.gr page, so they are not stated here.

Use the Website Legality Check. Enter a website address and it returns one of three answers: the site belongs to a licensed operator, it belongs to an affiliate of a licensed operator, or it is in the Register of Unlicensed Providers.

The middle answer is unusual and worth noticing. Greece tracks affiliates of licensed operators as a publicly checkable category in their own right — no other regulator among our six exposes that. A site recommending casinos to Greek players can be looked up in the same tool as the casinos.

There is also a formal Register of Licence Holders, in Greek only, searchable by licence number, with a client-side table. One link to skip: the HGC’s own self-exclusion page points at a White List address on the old domain, and that URL returned 404 on 6 August 2026. The Website Legality Check is the working tool.

The HGC states the position without softening it: the Unified Register of Excluded Players is under development and preparation prior to becoming operational, and until it launches players cannot be registered in it and an exclusion cannot be applied automatically and universally across all licence holders. No launch date has been given.

So exclusion in Greece today works one operator at a time, in several shapes. An indefinite self-exclusion runs for at least a year and never ends automatically: it ends only on your request, filed after the year has passed, with a new participation agreement. A temporary self-exclusion runs for a period you choose, minimum one month, and ends by itself when that expires — available for online gambling and OPAP PLAY terminals, but not for land-based casinos. A 24-hour time-out covers online gambling. A Day Stop covers OPAP PLAY terminals until midnight the same day. A land-based casino exclusion is mandatory for six months from the declaration and ends only on request.

Getting something close to a universal exclusion today means one of two procedures, and the difference is not obvious.

For a universal temporary exclusion there is no central route at all. You submit a separate request to each licence holder you have an account with.

For a universal indefinite exclusion you may do the same, or you may ask the HGC to administer it. For the HGC route, email info@hgc.gov.gr a clear copy of both sides of your identity card or passport, and a solemn declaration bearing an authenticated electronic signature through gov.gr, stating which categories you want to be excluded from — online gambling, OPAP PLAY terminals, land-based casinos, in any combination — and consenting to your data being processed. The HGC then notifies all relevant licence holders.

An exclusion can also be started by a court-appointed guardian or legal representative, by a court decision, by a reasoned decision of the licence holder, or — for land-based casinos only — by a first-degree relative or spouse.

The HGC names two organisations on its support services page, and only two.

EOPAE, the national organisation for the prevention and treatment of addictions, runs the psychological support line on 1145. Its site is in Greek, with no English version.

Ανώνυμοι Τζογαδόροι, Gamblers Anonymous Greece, holds meetings in Athens at 3 Themistokleous Street and in Thessaloniki at 19 Odysseos Street.

The HGC also links Gamalyze, a self-assessment tool for gambling behaviour, from its responsible gaming page.

Two naming corrections that circulate widely. The Greek treatment programme is KETHEA ALFA, not “KETHEA-ALPHA”, and the domain kethea-alpha.gr does not respond. The main KETHEA site could not be reached on 6 August 2026 either: its TLS certificate had expired, so a browser shows a security warning before the page opens. We are not linking it until that is fixed — sending someone in difficulty into a warning screen is worse than one fewer link — and the HGC does not name KETHEA among its own support services in any case.

Two gaps overlap in Greece, and they compound.

The first is the one every market on this site shares: exclusion applies only to licensed gambling operators, in the HGC’s own words. A site outside the licensed market does not receive the notification, is not required to check anything, and is not reachable by the regulator that would enforce it.

The second is local and temporary: with no unified register, even a fully licensed operator only knows about your exclusion if you told it, or if the HGC notified it under the indefinite-exclusion route. A temporary exclusion at one licence holder tells the other seventeen nothing.

Until the register launches, that makes a device-level blocker more important in Greece than anywhere else on this site, not less. It works on your device, covers licensed and unlicensed sites alike, and needs no register to exist.

For a complaint about a licensed operator, the HGC runs an electronic complaints platform covering breaches of the law, of the terms governing a gambling licence, or of players’ rights. Read its submission instructions first so the report can be acted on.