France blocks Polymarket over bettor risk and alleged manipulation in weather bets

France’s gambling regulator has blocked access to Polymarket, saying the prediction market platform poses a risk of significant user losses and may be vulnerable to manipulation. For PSPs and acquiring teams, the important bit is simple: prediction markets are moving from a regulatory gray zone into active enforcement.

1. On Friday, July 17, France’s gambling regulator said it had ordered French internet providers to block access to Polymarket. The move was formalized on Thursday, July 16, and the regulator said the site was “promoting an illegal gambling and betting offering.”
2. The authority said the block will remain in place while regulators assess whether Polymarket complies with French gambling rules. A spokesperson also said the platform attracted a “particularly large audience,” which is usually regulator-speak for “this is now a problem at scale.”
3. One of the specific concerns was alleged use of inside information in weather betting. In April 2026, France’s weather service filed a police complaint after detecting anomalies in temperature gauges at Paris’s Charles de Gaulle airport. Those irregularities matched a sequence of well-timed bets on Polymarket, which uses data from that airport as the reference for bets on Paris’s daily maximum temperature. Weather forecasts have become one of the platform’s most popular categories.
4. France is not acting alone. In May 2026, Spain temporarily banned Polymarket and Kalshi. In June, the main U.S. derivatives regulator published new proposed rules for the sector. In April, Brazil blocked 27 prediction-market platforms, including Polymarket and Kalshi.
5. Polymarket and Kalshi let traders and bettors buy and sell contracts tied to events ranging from sports results to elections and armed conflicts in Iran and Ukraine. That breadth is exactly why regulators keep circling: once a product looks like betting, sits close to public-interest events, and can be traded around suspicious timing, the line between market and gambling gets a lot thinner than the pitch deck suggests.