How to Complain About an Online Casino in the UK

The mistake almost everyone makes first

The Gambling Commission is the regulator, and it has no power to resolve an individual complaint or to get your money back. It licenses operators, sets the rules and takes action against companies that break them, but it will not adjudicate your dispute.

Reporting your problem to the Commission is still worth doing, and we come back to why at the end. It is just not the route to a decision, and treating it as one is how people lose a month.

The route that ends in a decision has three steps: the operator, then an alternative dispute resolution provider, then the courts. Each one has to be exhausted before the next will look at it.

Step one: complain to the operator, in writing

Every operator licensed in Great Britain must have a complaints procedure and must tell you what it is. Use it, and use it in writing even if live chat is quicker, because the adjudicator later will want to see what was said.

Keep the complaint narrow and factual. An adjudicator decides on evidence and terms, not on how unfair something felt, so a short account with dates and figures does better than a long one.

• What happened, with dates and amounts, in the order it happened.
• Screenshots of the balance, the bet, the bonus terms or the withdrawal request.
• Any chat transcripts or emails, exported rather than described.
• What you want: the withdrawal released, the balance restored, the account reopened.

Step two: the eight week clock

The operator has eight weeks to resolve your complaint. If it has not been resolved to your satisfaction by then, you can take it to an alternative dispute resolution provider, and you do not need the operator's agreement to do so.

You can go earlier than eight weeks if the operator issues a final response or deadlocks the complaint before the deadline. What you cannot do is skip the operator entirely, and an ADR provider will send you back if you try.

Note the wording, because it matters. The test is whether the complaint was resolved to your satisfaction, not whether the operator has replied. A reply that refuses your complaint is a resolved complaint from the operator's point of view and an unresolved one from yours, and yours is the one that counts for escalation.

Step three: alternative dispute resolution

Every operator licensed for Great Britain has to be signed up to an ADR provider approved by the Gambling Commission, and its identity is in the operator's terms and on its website. IBAS and eCOGRA handle the majority of disputes between them.

ADR is free to you. The operator pays for the service. Expect roughly four to eight weeks from submission to decision, and expect the process to be conducted on documents rather than in person.

A ruling from IBAS is binding on the operator up to a value of 10,000 pounds. It is not binding on you: if you reject the decision you keep the right to pursue the matter through the courts, which the operator does not.

Submit the same narrow, evidenced account you gave the operator, plus the operator's response. Adding new arguments at this stage rarely helps and often muddies a case that was clear.

What ADR will not decide

This is the part worth reading before you spend time on a submission, because the most common reason a dispute is rejected is that it was a matter for the regulator rather than the adjudicator.

ADR handles transactional disputes: a bet settled wrongly, a bonus applied or removed incorrectly, a withdrawal not paid, a balance confiscated. It is not the forum for a general complaint about service quality, an allegation that games are rigged, or a claim arising from problem gambling.

• Allegations that games or outcomes are rigged. Game fairness is a licensing and testing matter for the Commission.
• General dissatisfaction with service where no specific transaction is in dispute.
• Claims that the operator should have intervened in your gambling. These are not transactional disputes.
• Anything already before a court.

A dedicated gambling ombudsman

The 2023 white paper proposed a single gambling ombudsman to replace the current patchwork of ADR providers, and IBAS has publicly put itself forward for the role. As of mid 2026 it is not operational, and ADR as described above remains the route. If you are reading this some time after the date on this page, it is worth checking whether that has changed.

When the complaint is really about your bank

If the dispute is that a deposit left your account and never arrived, or a payment was taken twice, or a card was charged after you asked your bank to block gambling transactions, then the other party is your bank or payment provider rather than the casino.

That is a financial services complaint. It goes to the provider first, and if it is not resolved you can take it to the Financial Ombudsman Service, which covers banks and payment firms. The Financial Ombudsman does not adjudicate disputes with gambling operators themselves, so the distinction decides where your complaint should go.

Report it to the Commission anyway

Once your own complaint is on its way through the proper route, tell the Gambling Commission what happened. It will not act on your case, and it will say so, but it uses reports as intelligence, and patterns across many reports are what trigger investigations and licence action against an operator.

It costs you a few minutes and it is the only part of this process that improves things for anyone other than you.

If the complaint is bound up with gambling that has stopped being enjoyable, deal with that separately and first. GamCare runs the National Gambling Helpline free and around the clock, GambleAware publishes support options, and GAMSTOP will exclude you from every operator licensed in Great Britain in one registration. None of those affect your dispute, and none of them require you to drop it.