Self-Exclusion Schemes Compared: National and Provincial Registers

National registers for self-exclusion now differ more than they resemble one another. Great Britain, Sweden, the Netherlands, Germany and Australia each run a central list. Ontario and Alberta added provincial systems during 2026. Coverage, check frequency and the products caught vary in every case, and what GICNT-PP asks of a licensee under player protection requirements depends on which of those it actually faces.

What a Self-Exclusion Register Blocks and What It Leaves Open

A central register does one thing well. It applies a single decision by the player across every operator that the issuing authority licenses, so the request does not have to be repeated brand by brand. Everything outside that licensing perimeter is untouched. A site licensed elsewhere and reachable from the same browser never sees the entry and carries no duty to act on it. This is the most common misunderstanding in the market, and it is worth stating plainly in player-facing copy rather than leaving it implied.

Two further limits shape what a scheme is worth. The first is product scope: registers are drawn to fit the market they sit in, so the Australian one covers wagering and nothing else, while the German one reaches arcades and land-based casinos as well as online play. The second is the check itself. A register is only as good as the moment at which the operator queries it, and the space between a nightly refresh and a query at login is the space through which an excluded player logs in. That distinction is what separates a working scheme from a formal one, and it explains why regulator mandates on responsible gambling tools increasingly specify timing rather than mere availability.

Six Registers Compared by Coverage and Check Point

The six schemes below are the ones most B2C licensees encounter. Administration sits with the regulator in Sweden and the Netherlands, with a separate state authority in Germany, with a contracted supplier in Australia, with the market operator in Ontario, and with a non-profit company in Great Britain. That variation matters operationally, because it determines who issues credentials, who publishes technical specifications and who audits the integration.

Market	Register	Administered by	Live since	Gambling covered	Shortest term
Great Britain	GAMSTOP	The National Online Self Exclusion Scheme Ltd	Mandatory from 31 March 2020	All GB-licensed remote gambling	6 months
Sweden	Spelpaus	Spelinspektionen	1 January 2019	All Swedish-licensed online and land-based gambling	10 days
Netherlands	CRUKS	Kansspelautoriteit	1 October 2021	Licensed online gambling, casinos and arcades	6 months
Germany	OASIS	Regierungspräsidium Darmstadt for all Länder	GlüStV 2021	All licensed forms, online and land-based	3 months
Australia	BetStop	Dataworks Group for the ACMA	21 August 2023	Licensed online and telephone wagering only	3 months
Ontario	BetGuard	iGaming Ontario	14 May 2026	All regulated iGaming sites, including OLG	6 months

GAMSTOP Puts the Duty on Every Remote Licensee in Great Britain

Participation is a licence condition, not a voluntary arrangement. Social Responsibility Code Provision 3.5.5 obliges remote licensees to take part in the multi-operator scheme, and that has been mandatory since 31 March 2020. On 1 April 2024 the Gambling Commission widened the provision so that licensees making and accepting bets by telephone, email, SMS or messaging services are caught as well, with no minimum volume threshold. What GAMSTOP requires of operators is therefore uniform across remote licence categories, and letting a registered person through is treated as a social responsibility failure rather than a technical slip.

Volume has grown steadily. By the end of 2025, 562,000 people had registered, and the total reached 614,738 during the first half of 2026. In the six months to 31 December 2025 the scheme took 58,675 new registrations, an average of 319 a day, with people aged 16 to 24 accounting for 29% of them. A five-year term with automatic renewal, introduced at the end of 2024, had been selected by more than half of five-year registrants by December 2025, which suggests a cohort treating the tool as indefinite rather than as a pause.

The perimeter is narrower than the numbers imply. The scheme reaches GB-licensed online gambling; premises-based exclusion was run separately until the betting shop scheme was folded in and rebranded, and offshore sites remain reachable throughout. Groups serving Great Britain alongside other markets should not treat one integration as coverage, because the LCCP and its licensing objectives govern the British perimeter and nothing outside it.

How Spelpaus Moves to Real-Time Verification From 1 August 2026

Sweden has rebuilt the technical layer beneath its register. SIFS 2026:3 was decided on 23 April 2026, published on 29 April and takes effect on 1 August 2026. It replaces a single general query with a set of purpose-specific ones, and the requirements for Spelpaus integration change accordingly.

• Each licensee receives its own Actor ID and API key from the regulator, and those credentials are mandatory for every query against the register.
• Registration and login checks run through one dedicated interface; direct marketing checks run through a separate one. Using a single query for all purposes stops being compliant after the deadline.
• Status must be confirmed before any direct marketing is dispatched, not only before play begins.
• A 10-day option was added during 2026, alongside the existing one, three and six month terms and the open-ended entry that runs for at least 12 months.
• More than 134,500 people were registered as of May 2026, against a scheme launched on 1 January 2019.

The same reform package carried a ban on gambling funded by credit, in force from May 2026, so an operator revisiting Spelinspektionen licence conditions for the August deadline is unlikely to be changing only one thing. The August work is a system change rather than a configuration change, and the regulator has signalled that it will test compliance rather than take it on file.

CRUKS and OASIS Check the Person Rather Than the Account

The Dutch register went live with the Remote Gambling Act on 1 October 2021 and is run by the Kansspelautoriteit. Enrolment runs through DigiD and produces a CRUKS code derived from the citizen service number, and that code is what the operator queries. The CRUKS check runs before each login, and a match denies access outright instead of flagging the account for review. The minimum term is six months and cannot be shortened, although it can be extended. The Netherlands also permits a third party, whether a relative or the operator itself, to ask the authority to enter someone, subject to an investigation that takes at least six weeks. KSA licensing obligations sit alongside this in the form of a control database, so supervision draws on the operator data directly.

Germany runs the broader system. OASIS operates under sections 8 to 8d of the Glücksspielstaatsvertrag 2021 (State Treaty on Gambling) and is administered permanently by the Regierungspräsidium Darmstadt on behalf of all federal states, not by the GGL. Operators match surname, first name and date of birth against the file before a player takes part, and the OASIS Sperrsystem places obligations on operators of arcades, land-based casinos, betting shops and licensed online sites alike. More than 360,000 exclusions were active in 2026. The authority processed roughly 60,000 applications during 2025, and the system handled over 5.2 billion queries in that year, an average of about 432 million a month, across roughly 9,000 connected providers and 41,000 premises. A self-exclusion runs for one year by default, an individually chosen term cannot fall below three months, and a third-party entry always runs for at least a year. Nothing lapses automatically, which is the detail most often missed: the entry stands until the excluded person applies to have it lifted.

BetStop Covers Wagering but Not Online Casino Play

The Australian register was the tenth and final measure of the National Consumer Protection Framework for Online Wagering. It launched on 21 August 2023 and is operated by Dataworks Group on behalf of the ACMA, which retains the compliance role.

• Scope is confined to licensed interactive wagering, online and by telephone. Online casino may not lawfully be supplied to Australians at all, so self-exclusion through the BetStop register does not reach it.
• Terms run from a minimum of three months to lifetime.
• Registered providers must refuse bets, refuse new accounts, close existing accounts and refund any credit, and stop sending marketing.
• Providers must promote the register and link to it on their websites and in promotional electronic messages. The ACMA has issued warnings where that has not been done.
• The register does not integrate with state, territory or operator schemes. Someone already excluded elsewhere has to register again separately.
• 59,830 people had registered by 31 March 2026, and 37,247 exclusions were active on that date. New South Wales accounted for 18,601 registrations, Victoria for 16,063 and Queensland for 12,310.
• The statutory review report was tabled in Parliament on 25 February 2026.

That product boundary matters when assessing exposure, because the Interactive Gambling Act draws the line between what may be offered to Australians and what may only be blocked. A register cannot cover a product that is prohibited outright, so harm associated with offshore casino play falls outside the scheme by design.

Canada Replaced Operator-Only Schemes With Provincial Registers in 2026

Canada has no federal register and is unlikely to get one, because gambling is conducted and managed at provincial level. Until May 2026, an Ontario player who wanted out of the regulated market had to repeat the request at every site. BetGuard, launched by iGaming Ontario on 14 May 2026, replaced that with a single enrolment covering all regulated iGaming sites in the province, including the online platforms of the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation. It was built with Integrity Compliance 360 and Dataworks and is modelled on the Australian register.

The centralised self-exclusion programme in Ontario sits in Registrar’s Standard 2.14.1, which obliges every operator to participate and to promote the programme on its site. Requirement 12 was simplified on 2 April 2026 so that the outcome is unambiguous: a centrally self-excluded person must not reach a gaming site even while the central system is unavailable, which places the fallback duty squarely on the operator. Standard 2.14 stays in force in parallel, and the AGCO will revisit it no more than 12 months after launch. Terms are six months, one year, five years or a custom period, and they can be extended but not shortened. AGCO iGaming standards therefore require two layers, the operator programme and the provincial one, until the review concludes.

Alberta built the same thing into its opening day. The province’s regulated market went live on 13 July 2026 under the iGaming Alberta Act, with AGLC as regulator and the Alberta iGaming Corporation as market operator, and integration with a centralised self-exclusion system was a condition of launch rather than a later addition. For operators entering both provinces, that means two separate integrations against two separate registers, with no reciprocity between them.

Where No Central Register Exists, Operator Schemes Carry the Load

Most regulated European markets run something central. Denmark has operated ROFUS since 2012 and passed 60,000 registrations in May 2025. Malta is the significant exception, and it matters in volume terms because a large share of European-facing B2C activity sits under a Maltese licence with no national register to connect to. Directive 2 of 2018 sets a minimum standard and leaves each licensee to maintain its own list.

The MGA tested how that works in practice during the first half of 2025, reviewing 20 licensees and 58 active URLs through a mystery shopping exercise, prompted by complaints that players who had excluded on one brand could still reach another brand under the same licence. Overall compliance was described as broadly positive, but the exercise found gaps of exactly that kind. Where there is no register, the burden of proof shifts onto the operator, and the following become the practical test.

• Apply an exclusion across every brand under the same licence, not only the brand where the request was made.
• Match on identity rather than on the account, so that near-duplicate details do not open a second route back in.
• Suppress marketing to the excluded person across all brands and all channels, not only the one they used.
• Allow withdrawal of a remaining balance while blocking play.
• Record what was blocked and when, because there is no central log to fall back on.

MGA licence conditions set the floor here. The absence of a register raises rather than lowers what an operator has to evidence, and the same reasoning applies with more force in offshore regimes where no equivalent directive exists at all.

What GICNT-PP Requires of Register Integration

GICNT-PP is audited twice a year, and register integration is one of the areas where evidence is either straightforward to produce or conspicuously absent. The standard treats the self-exclusion obligations of an operator as market-specific rather than global, so a group certificate does not follow a brand into a new jurisdiction.

• Connect to every applicable register in every market served, and evidence the connection market by market rather than at group level.
• Query at account opening and at login, and again before any direct marketing is dispatched.
• Block account creation and access on a match, without holding the result in a queue for manual review.
• Keep a documented fallback that blocks rather than admits when the register cannot be reached, and log every instance in which it was used.
• Permit withdrawal of a player balance during an exclusion wherever the scheme allows it.
• Run an operator scheme of your own in markets with no central register, applied across every brand under the same licence.
• Retain query logs and blocking decisions so that an auditor can reconstruct any individual case on request.

Register integration is the blunt instrument, and it acts only after the player has already decided. The finer work sits in player interaction requirements, where the trigger is observed behaviour rather than a request, and where the two mechanisms are assessed together.