France’s gambling regulator has told licensed operators they cannot withhold a win or hold on to an account balance because they suspect a customer of cheating. The Autorité Nationale des Jeux (ANJ) published new guidance on gambling fraud on 31 August 2026, after a consultation with licensed casinos and the French gambling mediator, setting out what an operator has to show before it voids a bet or empties an account.
The regulator’s position is that the gambling contract holds once a bet is accepted.
“Characterising fraud requires the collection of probative evidence, and the operator cannot refuse to pay a win or return part or all of an account balance on the basis of mere suspicions, without undermining the binding force of the gambling contract.”
The guidance arrives after two French court decisions that turned on exactly that question, and it gives the mediator and the courts a written standard to measure operator conduct against.
What the ANJ treats as fraud
The guidance covers identity fraud, payment fraud, abusive chargebacks, gambling-related fraud and money dumping, the deliberate transfer of funds between accounts by losing on purpose. Each category carries its own evidence problem. A chargeback leaves a payment trail. A claim that a bettor knew the result before placing the wager does not.
The ANJ does not tell operators which controls to run. It tells them that the controls have to produce evidence capable of standing up when the customer disputes the decision.
The Winamax ruling
On 1 July 2025 the Tribunal judiciaire de Paris ruled against Winamax in a dispute over five bets. The operator argued the bets were devoid of randomness and that the customer had exploited the delay between the television feed and live play, placing wagers on events he had already seen.
The court found the proof of fraud was not provided. Winamax had already validated the win and confirmed payment by email before reversing the decision. The bettor had also taken a cash-out of €400,000 rather than let the bets run to a possible €625,000, which the court read as evidence he did not know how the events would end. The matches ran simultaneously in different countries, so he could not have watched them all in person.
Winamax was ordered to pay €402,000 plus the €218.68 left in the account.
Where Betclic held the line
The outcome went the other way in February 2026, when a court of appeal upheld an account closure by Betclic. The operator produced shared IP addresses, shared devices and 35 comparable bets placed across linked accounts. That evidence was enough to justify closing the account.
It was not enough to keep the money. Betclic was still required to refund €32,785.30 to the customer. The two rulings separate two decisions operators often treat as one: ending a commercial relationship, and confiscating what sits in the account.
Disputes are climbing
The French gambling mediator received 1,856 applications in 2025, a 20% increase on the previous year. Account management accounted for 42.4% of accepted cases, making it the largest single category of complaint. Account closures, frozen balances and withdrawal blocks all fall under that heading.
The volume is what pushed the ANJ to write the guidance rather than leave the standard to be set case by case.
Verification moves earlier
The practical consequence for operators is that checks have to happen before money is at stake, not at the point a customer asks to withdraw a large sum. The UK Gambling Commission has given licensees the same instruction, telling them to complete identity verification proactively instead of waiting for a withdrawal request to trigger it.
Operators running French licences now face a documented expectation that fraud files are built while the account is active. Suspicion recorded after a payout request, with no supporting record behind it, is the position the Paris court rejected.
The ANJ has not attached a sanctions schedule to the guidance. It does not need to. Licensed operators submit annual compliance plans to the regulator, and the guidance gives the ANJ a reference point when it reviews them. For customers, the more immediate effect is at the mediator’s desk, where a refused payout can now be tested against a published standard rather than an operator’s own terms.
Source: Autorité Nationale des Jeux
