France’s Autorité Nationale des Jeux (ANJ) ordered the country’s internet providers to block Polymarket on July 16, invoking administrative powers a March 2022 law transferred from judges to the regulator’s president. The ANJ’s own investigation, opened by the Paris prosecutor’s cybercrime unit on May 4, found that weather-related bets “appeared to be rigged” after sensors feeding the market’s data may have been hacked.
The ANJ first warned Polymarket in November 2024. The company answered with geoblocking that stopped French payments but not French traffic: VPNs kept the site open, and June alone brought 578,751 visits from 205,057 unique French users, per Similarweb data the ANJ cited. Add in a total absence of know-your-customer checks, and the ANJ escalated from a payment ban that wasn’t working to an outright ISP block.
France isn’t alone. Belgium, Germany, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania and Switzerland have all restricted Polymarket, and France blocked 1,290 gambling URLs last year alone. The pattern is a continent treating prediction markets as gambling first and financial innovation second, regardless of how the platforms describe themselves.
The timing is awkward for the category. Days before the ANJ order, Kalshi rolled out a pilot with AppliedXL to let users trade on clinical trial results and FDA decisions, with CEO Tarek Mansour pitching it as “compliance-first.” Polymarket’s rigged-sensor problem is the exact failure mode that pitch is built to avoid, and European regulators aren’t waiting to see if it works.
Polymarket hasn’t responded to requests for comment. The Paris cybercrime probe remains open, with no charging decision yet disclosed.
James Okafor