In April 2020, Great Britain became the first nation to implement an outright ban on the use of credit cards for gambling transactions. The ban was implemented based on evidence that the use of credit cards was associated with greater harms amongst people who gamble.
Research pointed to GambleAware data gathered between July 2018 and July 2019 from 139,152 gambling accounts across seven gambling operators, which detailed that 5.7% of overall deposits into online gambling accounts were made using credit cards.
Although credit card transactions remained relatively low in usage, GambleAware noted that gamblers with significant wins or high losses were more likely to use credit cards, as indicated by 26% of players with losses exceeding £5,000.
Furthermore, evidence showed that 19.8% of account holders who had received an intervention had used cre..
