CasinoIntel

Last reviewed: 8 October 2026. Since 11 June 2024, an Australian licensed online wagering service has been prohibited from accepting payment by credit card, linked credit account or digital currency from a customer physically present in Australia. The rule sits in section 15C of the Interactive Gambling Act 2001, as amended by the Interactive Gambling Amendment (Credit and Other Measures) Act 2023, and the ACMA enforces it. As at the date above, the statutory review the amending Act requires after two years of operation is due, and this analysis does not assume its outcome. What the federal provision actually does Before the 2023 amendment, section 15C already restricted credit in interactive wagering, but it carried a carve out: payment by way of an independently issued credit card was permitted. The amending Act removed those words from section 15C(1)(b)(ii) and 15C(3)(b) and replaced section 15B with a provision headed "Credit must not be provided to customers of certain in...

Last reviewed: 29 September 2026. As at this date, BetStop, the National Self Exclusion Register, has operated for a little over three years under Part 7B of the Interactive Gambling Act 2001 (Cth). It covers licensed online and telephone wagering, and nothing else. Its design follows the federal line drawn by section 15: because no Australian licence permits online casino games, there is no licensed online casino provider for the register to bind, and state regulated venue pokies sit outside it entirely. Federal: what Part 7B establishes BetStop was created by amendments that inserted Part 7B into the Interactive Gambling Act 2001 (Cth), and became operational on 21 August 2023. It is a single register that a person joins once, rather than a set of provider by provider exclusions. Its reach is defined by the providers it binds: licensed interactive wagering service providers, around 150 of them according to the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA). It does not rep...

Last reviewed: 12 September 2026. As of this date, Australia's two largest casino operators, Crown Resorts and The Star Entertainment Group, have each been found unsuitable to hold a casino licence by at least one state regulator within the past five years, and Star's Sydney licence remains under active suspension and special-manager oversight. Neither company lost a licence outright following these findings; both were instead given a supervised reform period, a pattern that has now played out three times for Crown and twice for Star across four states. This article sets out what each inquiry found, what "unsuitable" actually triggers under state casino law, and where each licence stands today. Federal: Why This Is a State Story, Not a Federal One Federal law, principally the Interactive Gambling Act 2001 (Cth) covered in this site's earlier analysis of section 15, governs whether an online gambling product can lawfully be offered to an Australian customer. It ...

Last reviewed: 11 September 2026. As of this date, online casino games, including pokies, blackjack and roulette, remain prohibited under federal law from being offered to a person in Australia, regardless of who is offering them or from where. That prohibition has not changed since the Interactive Gambling Act 2001 came into force, and no current federal proposal would change it. What has changed, repeatedly, is how aggressively the prohibition gets enforced against operators who ignore it. Federal: Section 15 and What Counts as Prohibited The Interactive Gambling Act 2001 (Cth) creates its core offence at section 15: a person commits an offence if they intentionally provide a prohibited interactive gambling service with an Australian customer link, carrying maximum penalties in the order of $220,000 per day for an individual and $1.1 million per day for a corporation, following the 2017 penalty increase. Section 5 defines a prohibited interactive gambling service broadly enough to...