France Blocks Polymarket After 578,751 Visits Defied 2024 Trading Ban

France’s gambling regulator, the Autorité Nationale des Jeux (ANJ), has ordered the country’s internet service providers to block Polymarket, citing data showing 578,751 visits and 205,057 unique visitors from France in June alone — traffic the regulator says proves an earlier ban on the platform’s financial transactions had failed. The order, issued July 16, reclassifies Polymarket as an illegal gambling operation rather than a financial trading venue, exposing it to fines of up to €100,000 ($114,380) for promoting unauthorized betting.

The numbers matter because they undercut the effectiveness of France’s original restriction. A ban on Polymarket’s financial transactions has been in place since November 2024, yet the ANJ’s own citation of Similarweb traffic data shows hundreds of thousands of French visits still hitting the platform every month, largely because a VPN was enough to bypass the block. This time, the regulator is going further: rather than restricting payments, it wants the site itself unreachable from French internet connections.

Why the ANJ calls it gambling, not trading

Central to the ANJ’s order is Polymarket’s homepage, which remained accessible even under the prior restrictions and continuously displays live odds for active markets. The regulator argued this real-time odds feed functions as advertising for an unauthorized gambling product, regardless of whether users can actually place bets through it. “The site’s homepage, which dynamically displays real-time odds for various events open to betting, thus serves as a major channel for disseminating and promoting Polymarket’s offerings, even though the site’s operations are not authorized in France,” the ANJ wrote.

The regulator also pointed to what it described as addictive design features comparable to licensed gambling products, but “amplified by the absence of the protective mechanisms found in the legal gambling market” — a reference to the lack of self-exclusion tools that regulated French betting operators are required to offer.

Weather sensors and a $10 million election bet

Two specific incidents anchor the ANJ’s case for market manipulation. France’s national weather service, Météo-France, complained that a temperature sensor tied to weather-related Polymarket contracts appeared to have been tampered with, prompting the Paris prosecutor’s cybercrime unit to open a formal investigation on May 4. The ANJ said bets on some events “appeared to be rigged,” specifically flagging that “weather sensors may have been hacked.”

The regulator also revisited the case of a French trader known as “Fredi9999,” who reportedly moved U.S. election odds on Polymarket in 2024 through multimillion-dollar positions — an episode critics have cited as evidence that large bettors can sway prediction-market prices well beyond ordinary trading activity.

France joins a growing global blocklist

Polymarket now says it is geoblocked in 36 regions worldwide, with more than 30 countries having imposed restrictions to date, including Singapore, Poland, Portugal, Hungary, Ukraine, Brazil and Indonesia. Polymarket did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the ANJ order.

For crypto-native traders, the France order is a reminder that prediction markets remain in a regulatory gray zone even where they’ve built genuine liquidity. Blocking access at the ISP level — rather than merely restricting payment rails — signals regulators are prepared to treat these venues the same way they treat unlicensed betting sites, with real financial penalties for the platforms and a harder wall for users trying to route around bans via VPN.

Read more: ESMA’s MiCA Register Hits 294 CASPs as New Additions Slow to 14 From 37

Sources

• coindesk.com
• cointelegraph.com