Blocking tools, audited: GAMSTOP, BetBlocker, Gamban and the bank switch

Four products claim to stop you gambling and get compared as rivals. They are not rivals: they sit at three layers — the operator’s account check, your device, your payment — and each one’s cover ends at the edge of its own layer.

This audit reads the terms, not the pitch. Nothing here was installed or trialled: it is vendor and regulator documentation read on 3 September 2026, and the prices, counters and bank arrangements are point-in-time.

The four, on paper

GAMSTOP: the hardest terms, the narrowest perimeter

GAMSTOP is operated by The National Online Self Exclusion Scheme Limited, company number 10504973; registration is free, and its About page calls the process “quick and easy”. You register, it verifies and lists you, and operators check the register when someone tries to use an online gambling account.

The terms are the least reversible in the set, deliberately. You pick a period from six months to five years, and per GAMSTOP’s own page you cannot cancel during it. Nor does it lapse quietly: the exclusion stays in place afterwards unless you contact GAMSTOP to remove it.

The perimeter is the caveat, and it is jurisdictional: GAMSTOP Online’s wording is that it “blocks you from signing up for or using online accounts with gambling companies licensed in Great Britain”, and it publishes a list of the participating GB-licensed online operators. That is large; it is not the internet. The cover is account-level, sitting at the operator’s login.

The free one, on the charity’s own numbers

BetBlocker is the odd entry: the largest published coverage figure in the set, at no price. It began in 2017 inside the ADR service ThePOGG and became a charity in its own right in 2019. It is free permanently — “Absolutely nothing. Ever.” — funded by grants, donations and charitable support, and caps nothing: any number of installations, across Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, iOS, Fire OS and AppGallery.

The front-page figures, more than 423,000 sites and more than 1,900 apps, are the charity’s own counter, not an audited number. More useful is that it states its limit plainly: it keeps “a list of several hundred” gambling information and promotion sites that surface on “the first page of Google”, and says that list “is not exhaustive”.

The priced one, and the door around the price

Gamban is the only entry carrying a subscription: £4.99 billed monthly or £29.99 billed annually after a seven-day free trial, the annual plan badged “Save 49%”.

The line that matters is not on the pricing page. Per the Gambling Commission’s guidance on blocking gambling transactions, Halifax offers customers “access to Gamban licences to block online gambling”, and Lloyds Bank customers are also offered “access to Gamban”. The Commission does not price that access, so ask your bank before you pay. That page is stamped 25 February 2025. Gamban’s own site says the subscription applies in England and Scotland and that Gamban stays free in Wales; this audit makes no claim about any other route.

The bank switch is a different failure mode

The Commission names eleven institutions under its gambling-blocking heading, and nine of them describe a block or card lock on the account or debit card: Bank of Scotland, Barclays, HSBC, Lloyds Bank, Monzo, NatWest, Royal Bank of Scotland, Santander and Starling. Halifax’s entry is tools, advice and Gamban access rather than a transaction block; MBNA’s is spend tracking only. The mechanism it describes is narrow — banks block “your bank account or debit card” so it cannot be “used for gambling transactions” — a decline at the payment layer that travels with the account or card, not with a device.

The value is the friction on lifting it, which varies. Per the Commission, HSBC customers “can lift a restriction but transactions will still be declined until the period has ended”; Monzo customers “will need to talk to the Monzo customer support team” to turn the block off. Where a delay is built in, the delay is the product.

The regulator’s August work touched self-exclusion once, on the land-based side: Holland Park Leisure Limited, an Adult Gaming Centre operator, was fined £150,000 on 18 August 2026 over a self-exclusion failure. The Commission’s framing is that “in Great Britain, all consumer-facing land-based gambling businesses must participate in a multi-operator self-exclusion scheme” — a premises measure; that notice does not mention GAMSTOP or the online side. Operator-side machinery is enforced and also fallible, which argues for owning a layer yourself — the same move the admin weight forced on price-shopping in odds comparison under financial risk checks: fewer accounts, chosen deliberately in advance.

The file, both columns

Verdict

The score is for legibility and coverage, not outcomes: none of these promises one and neither does this page. Friction only works on decisions you have not made yet. Set the month’s figure and the stop while the ledger is closed — a blocker installed after that point is a receipt, not a control.