Poland’s BLIK will automatically block payments to illegal casinos from September 1

BLIK, Poland’s largest payment system, will start declining transfers to sites listed in the government’s banned gambling domain register from September 1. The setup matters for high-risk PSPs because the check happens at authorization, not after the money has already moved.

1. BLIK will use an integration with the Ministry of Finance API to verify whether a merchant is legal in real time. In practice, that means the payment flow will be checked against the state register before the transaction is approved.
2. The block is not limited to direct payments. It also covers transactions routed through foreign settlement agents, which closes off one of the more obvious workarounds used by illegal operators.
3. The measure has the support of the National Bank of Poland. That matters because it signals that this is not just a gambling-policy tweak, but a payments-layer enforcement mechanism backed by the country’s central bank.
4. BLIK processes the overwhelming majority of online payments in Poland, so this is not a symbolic filter. For illegal gambling operators, it hits the monetization layer directly; for PSPs, it is a reminder that merchant screening is moving deeper into the transaction stack.

The bigger point for high-risk teams is that Poland is shifting enforcement from domain blocking, which merchants can work around by moving sites, to payment infrastructure control. If this model holds, other EU payment systems may treat the “registry plus automated processing block” setup as the default way to deal with illegal gambling traffic.