Poland is taking a new step in its fight against illegal online gambling: from 1 September 2026, BLIK is expected to block payments connected with gambling domains included in the Polish Ministry of Finance’s register of illegal gambling websites. The measure is significant because it moves enforcement beyond websites and directly into the payment infrastructure that makes illegal gambling commercially viable.
For Turkey, where authorities have also been fighting illegal bookmakers for years, the Polish approach offers an interesting case study. Both countries rely heavily on blocking illegal operators and disrupting their financial flows. But Poland’s attempt to connect a major domestic payment system directly to the government’s blacklist suggests a potentially more systematic model—one that Turkish regulators could study and adapt to local conditions.
Poland’s problem: blocking a website is not enough
Poland has had tools for combating illegal gambling for years. Its Gambling Act provides for a public register of domains used to offer gambling contrary to the law. Payment providers are prohibited from providing services on websites using domains entered into that register, and providers that fail to comply can face a financial penalty of up to PLN 250,000.
The Ministry of Finance’s register is not theoretical. It is actively maintained, with the official database showing an update as recently as 20 August 2026.
The underlying idea is straightforward: if an operator cannot legally offer gambling in Poland, it should not be able to use Polish financial infrastructure to collect deposits.
Yet implementation has been complicated.
Illegal operators can create new domains, mirror existing websites and change technical infrastructure faster than regulators can identify and list every new address. A Polish parliamentary response has acknowledged that illegal operators use technical methods to avoid the consequences of being added to the register, including creating new domains and mirrors.
This is where BLIK becomes particularly interesting.
BLIK brings the payment layer into the enforcement system
BLIK is one of Poland’s most important domestic payment systems. Its planned September 2026 measure is designed to reject transactions associated with gambling domains already included in the Ministry of Finance’s register. Reports indicate that Polski Standard Płatności, the company behind BLIK, has connected its system with the government register through an API, allowing the payment infrastructure to check the domain associated with a gambling transaction.
Technically, this is an important development.
The traditional enforcement chain looks something like this:
Illegal website → government identifies domain → domain is blocked → operator creates another domain → enforcement starts again.
The Polish payment approach adds another barrier:
Illegal website → domain identified → government register → payment system checks the domain → transaction rejected.
That does not make illegal gambling disappear. But it attacks one of the most important parts of the business model: getting money into the operator’s system.
It also illustrates why payment companies have become increasingly important in gambling regulation. Poland’s financial authorities have been pushing payment-service providers to take a more active role in stopping financial flows to unlicensed operators. In 2025, the Polish Financial Supervision Authority issued sector-wide warnings concerning payment providers and illegal gambling.
Turkey already has a powerful legal framework
The comparison with Turkey is particularly relevant because Turkey has taken a much harder line against unauthorised sports betting.
The central legislation is Law No. 7258, which regulates betting and games of chance connected with football and other sports competitions. Turkish authorities can target not only operators but also people who facilitate illegal betting, provide access to foreign betting sites, transfer money connected with illegal betting or promote such services.
The penalties can be severe. Under Article 5, depending on the conduct involved, people facilitating or organising illegal betting can face imprisonment, while facilitating participation in foreign betting through Turkey can carry four to six years’ imprisonment.
What could Turkey learn from Poland?
1. Move from individual accounts to payment infrastructure
Turkey has demonstrated that it can freeze thousands of accounts. The next question is whether parts of this intelligence can be transformed into automated payment-level controls.
Instead of identifying every mule account individually, authorities could potentially establish regulated interfaces between official illegal-betting databases and participating payment providers.
The Polish BLIK model provides a practical example of this architecture.
2. Create one authoritative technical blacklist
Poland’s Ministry of Finance operates a central domain register, which provides payment providers with an authoritative reference point.
Turkey could potentially strengthen coordination between the institutions responsible for gambling enforcement, financial intelligence, banking supervision and payment regulation.
A machine-readable database—updated rapidly and accessible through controlled APIs—could make it easier for banks, electronic-money institutions and other payment providers to identify prohibited operators.
3. Treat payment providers as part of the regulatory perimeter
This may be the biggest lesson.
Turkey’s Central Bank already supervises payment and electronic-money institutions under Law No. 6493. In its 2025 supervisory review, the CBRT reported that it revoked seven operating licences and suspended 14 licences following supervisory actions.
That means Turkey already has a sophisticated regulatory gateway through which payment providers can be supervised.
The lesson from Poland is that this infrastructure can potentially become more closely integrated with gambling enforcement.
4. Make legal operators easier to distinguish
A strong anti-illegal-gambling system should not merely make illegal betting difficult. It should also make legal betting easy to identify.
That is particularly important for consumers. If a user knows that a bookmaker appears on an official licensed-operator list and that domestic payment systems recognise that status, the legal market becomes more attractive.
The objective should therefore be a clear binary:
licensed operator = accessible through regulated payment infrastructure
unlicensed operator = payment rejected
That is considerably easier for consumers to understand than a system based solely on warnings and website blocks.
For Turkish regulators, the most interesting question may therefore not be whether to copy BLIK exactly. Turkey’s financial ecosystem is different, and its existing enforcement framework is already extensive. Instead, the more useful lesson could be how to connect regulatory intelligence with payment technology in real time.
If that connection can be achieved while preserving due process, effective appeals and clear distinctions between licensed and unlicensed operators, the result could be a considerably more efficient way of shrinking the illegal betting market.
And that may ultimately be the most important lesson from Poland: the fight against illegal gambling is no longer only a fight over websites. It is increasingly a fight over money, data and payment infrastructure.
