France orders Polymarket blocked after its geoblocking was circumvented

France's gambling regulator ordered internet service providers to block Polymarket on 16 July 2026. The ANJ says Adventure One QSS Inc. had already received a formal notice over the polymarket.com offering. The company then introduced geoblocking that prevented financial transactions from French territory, but the regulator says users circumvented it in practice.

That sequence is the core of the action. The order did not begin with an immediate block. It followed monitoring dating back to November 2024, a formal notice and a technical restriction that the ANJ considered insufficient. The public statement classifies the prediction-market offer as illegal gambling promotion in France.

ANJ published unusually specific audience figures. It says Polymarket recorded 578,751 visits from France in June 2026 and 205,057 unique visitors. The regulator viewed the homepage's live odds as a major promotional channel for an offer that was not authorised in the country.

Those figures measure visits and visitors, not deposits or betting turnover. They do not show how many people successfully traded after the geoblock. They do, however, explain why the regulator treated continued visibility as more than a technical edge case and escalated to an ISP-level blocking order.

The French notice also refers to weather-related markets that may have been distorted after weather probes were allegedly hacked. It says the Paris prosecutor's cybercrime section opened an investigation on 4 May 2026 and assigned it to the national anti-cybercrime office. That is a live investigation, not a concluded finding.

The distinction is essential. The ANJ blocking decision is an administrative gambling action supported by its own view of the unauthorised offer and promotion. The separate cybercrime investigation does not establish that Polymarket, Adventure One or any named individual hacked equipment, directed manipulation or committed a criminal offence.

The Dutch proceeding has moved beyond the conditional stage described when the original order was issued. The Ksa imposed the cease order on 20 January 2026 and published it on 17 February, the day its compliance deadline expired. A collection decision dated 19 May records that Adventure One forfeited €420,000 and had not paid it. That is an administrative recovery step; the public record reviewed does not show that the money has been recovered.

Adventure One argued that Polymarket was a prediction market in which users traded positions and made informed decisions rather than participating in a game of chance. It also said it implemented Dutch blocking on 18 February. The Ksa rejected the objection and maintained the underlying order on 23 June, finding that the blocking measures came one day after the compliance deadline. The case record describes the route to a court appeal but does not publish a later court outcome.

The French block and Dutch recovery action remain separate national proceedings. They should not be combined into a single fine, and neither establishes the outcome of the distinct French cybercrime investigation mentioned by ANJ.

That separation also defines the next update. French access, Dutch collection and the Paris prosecutor’s cybercrime inquiry can change on different dates and through different documents. A development in one track must not be presented as a result in the others.

The immediate French consequence is a direction to access providers, not a licence suspension, because Polymarket did not hold the gambling authorisation that the ANJ says would be required. The order aims to reduce ordinary access and promotion from France. Users attempting workarounds do not turn the underlying offer into a regulated one.

The next material records would be a court challenge, confirmation of implementation by providers, an ANJ update on traffic or a conclusion to the cybercrime investigation. Until one appears, the accurate status is developing: the blocking order is confirmed, while the broader technical and criminal questions remain open.