Portugal's Regulator Has Ordered 3,043 Illegal Gambling Sites Blocked Since 2015

Portugal's gambling regulator has ordered internet providers to block 3,043 illegal betting and gaming websites since the country legalised online gambling in 2015, a running tally that keeps climbing as unlicensed operators chase Portuguese players. The figure, covering June 2015 to the end of June 2026, comes from the latest quarterly data published by the SRIJ (Serviço de Regulação e Inspeção de Jogos, the Gambling Regulation and Inspection Service), reported this week by Jornal de Negócios.

The enforcement is relentless because the target keeps moving. In the second quarter of 2026 alone, the regulator ordered 113 new sites blocked and notified 95 illegal operators to shut down. Over the full 11 years, it has served 1,834 such notifications and referred 77 cases to the Ministério Público (Public Prosecutor's Office) for criminal action — a reminder that running an unlicensed gambling site in Portugal is not a regulatory footnote but a crime, punishable by up to five years in prison.

The mechanism is straightforward. When the SRIJ identifies a site offering gambling to Portuguese users without a licence, it first orders the operator to cease. If that is ignored, it instructs the major internet providers — MEO, NOS and Vodafone — to block access to the domain, as happened in January when the prediction-market platform Polymarket was cut off after a regulator's order. Operators simply spin up new domains, which is why the cumulative count of blocks runs far ahead of the number of distinct businesses behind them.

All of this sits alongside a legal market that is both sizeable and growing. In the same second quarter, Portugal's 17 licensed operators, holding 30 licences between them, took in €328.2 million in gross gambling revenue, up 14.4% on a year earlier, split between €203.1 million from games of chance and €125.1 million from sports betting. The state's special online-gaming tax on that activity yielded €92.1 million, a 13.4% annual rise — figures swollen by this summer's World Cup, as an earlier report detailed.

The concern driving the blocking campaign is the scale of what sits outside that regulated perimeter. Earlier this year the Minister of the Economy, Manuel Castro Almeida, estimated that illegal online gambling in Portugal could be worth as much as €24 billion — potentially rivalling the legal market itself. Surveys cited in the debate suggest a substantial share of players use unlicensed sites, and that many do not realise doing so is against the law.

For residents, the practical point is about protection rather than legality alone. Licensed sites operate under rules on identity checks, advertising and responsible-gambling tools, and are wired into Portugal's central self-exclusion register, which lets a person bar themselves from every authorised operator at once. Illegal sites offer none of that: no self-exclusion, no guaranteed payouts, and a real risk of fraud, identity theft and lost deposits. The regulator's warning, echoed in a public-awareness push aimed especially at young people, is that a site accepting Portuguese bets without a licence is not a bargain but a trap — and that the demand for help is rising, as the opening of the country's first public gambling-addiction unit underlined.