France’s ANJ orders ISPs to block Polymarket after finding no KYC and 578,751 French visits last month

France’s gambling regulator has told internet service providers to block access to Polymarket, saying the prediction market functions like an illegal gambling site. For PSPs and acquirers, the useful bit is simple: the ANJ is treating prediction markets as a gambling access problem, a KYC problem, and a payment-blocking problem at the same time.

1. The order came from the Autorité Nationale des Jeux (ANJ), issued last week and flagged on Saturday, July 18, by CoinDesk. The regulator said Polymarket and similar platforms are illegal gambling sites, and warned that some of their “addictive features” mirror regulated gambling products but without the protective mechanisms found in the legal market.
2. The ANJ said an investigation launched in May found no know your customer (KYC) controls on Polymarket platforms available to French and European users. It also said some bets appeared to be rigged, citing weather-related bets where weather sensors may have been hacked.
3. France had already tried to reduce access through payments: the regulator said a prohibition on financial transactions was imposed in 2024, but users got around it with virtual private networks (VPN). The ANJ also said those restrictions had not stopped French users from using Polymarket.
4. The scale is not trivial. Using Similarweb data, the ANJ said Polymarket received 578,751 visits from 205,057 unique visitors in France last month. For PSPs, that is the part that matters: traffic can remain high even after payment restrictions, which means enforcement tends to move from the checkout layer to access-blocking and network-level measures.
5. France last year blocked 1,290 gambling-related URLs, and the CoinDesk report said France joined Belgium, Germany, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania and Switzerland in restricting access to Polymarket. Meanwhile, rival Kalshi said last week it had teamed with AppliedXL on a program allowing trading on clinical trial outcomes and FDA regulatory decisions, a reminder that prediction markets are still pushing into regulated and information-heavy verticals.

For high-risk operators, the signal from France is less about Polymarket specifically than about how quickly a prediction market can be framed as gambling, then pulled into the standard enforcement stack: KYC scrutiny, transaction bans, VPN workarounds, and ISP blocking.