Is online gambling legal in Australia? The Interactive Gambling Act, plainly

The short version

The Interactive Gambling Act 2001 makes it an offence to provide online casino games to people in Australia. It does not make it an offence to play. Sports betting and lotteries are licensed; online pokies, blackjack and roulette are not, so every casino site serving Australians is based offshore.

What the Act actually prohibits

The Act is aimed at operators. The prohibited services are online casino games, in-play sports betting, sports betting from providers without an Australian licence, and betting on lottery outcomes. Compliance is the operator’s problem: an Australian resident who accesses one of these services does not commit an offence under the legislation.

The Interactive Gambling Amendment Act 2017 is why the position hardened. It increased penalties, expanded the aiding-and-abetting offences, closed the “click-to-call” in-play loophole, banned bookmakers from offering lines of credit, and handed ACMA the investigative powers — formal warnings, infringement notices, civil penalties — it now uses. More than a hundred online gambling services pulled out of the Australian market after it passed; the ones that stayed simply do not hold an Australian licence and never will.

The regulators that matter

ACMA. The Australian Communications and Media Authority is the only regulator with an online-casino remit. It investigates operators that provide or advertise prohibited services, issues warnings and notices, and since November 2019 has asked ISPs to block the domains of sites it finds in breach — 1,751 gambling and affiliate sites by June 2026, added in regular batches. Blocking changes the address you type, not the legal position of the player. Anyone can report an operator through the interactive gambling complaint form. Be clear about what that does: it feeds an enforcement file against the operator. Nothing on ACMA’s compliance pages describes recovering a player’s balance, and we have not seen a case where it did.

State and territory regulators. Liquor & Gaming NSW, the VGCCC and their equivalents license pubs, clubs, land-based casinos and Australian-licensed bookmakers. They have no jurisdiction over an offshore casino and no complaint route for one. Do not waste a week on them.

The 2023 credit-card amendment

Since 11 June 2024, section 15C of the Act (inserted by the Interactive Gambling Amendment (Credit and Other Measures) Act 2023) makes it an offence — 500 penalty units criminal, 750 civil — for “a regulated interactive gambling service that is a wagering service” to accept a credit card, a credit-linked account or digital currency from a customer in Australia. Lotteries are exempt. Those bound are licensed Australian bookmakers. Offshore casinos are “prohibited” services under the same Act, so section 15C does not reach them and the Act has never penalised the player; their cashiers still show a card form, and it works with a debit card. Your own bank is the more practical obstacle — see the Visa and Mastercard page for which banks decline merchant code 7995 outright.

What it means for you

Your risk is commercial, not criminal: if an offshore casino refuses to pay, no Australian regulator will help. That is why licensing, ownership and a track record of paying withdrawals are the first three things we check.

Where to complain when an offshore casino will not pay

Exhaust the casino’s own complaint process first, in writing, and keep the emails. Every route below asks for that. Then there are two kinds of escalation: the licence regulator and the independent mediators. Their powers are very different.

The licence regulator

Curaçao. Since the National Ordinance on Games of Chance (LOK) took effect on 24 December 2024, the Gaming Control Board has become the Curaçao Gaming Authority (CGA). There is no player portal yet; the CGA takes complaints by email at complaints@cga.cw and says a standard form is coming. Its own wording is blunt: “the CGA does not handle individual complaints against gaming providers. Resolving disputes between players and gaming operators is not within our mandate.” Complaints are logged, and a pattern can trigger action against the operator. Under the policy licensees had to adopt by 31 July 2025, each casino must offer a complaint form, answer within four weeks (extendable once), and give you access to a CGA-certified alternative dispute resolution provider at no cost to you — worth asking support for by name.

Anjouan. The Anjouan licensing authority publishes a third-party complaint policy that requires you to complain through the casino’s own seal-linked submission function, wait up to 30 days, and then go to an “approved” ADR provider. The authority states that it “does not handle, mediate, or adjudicate player complaints” and will not correspond with players about individual cases. In practice there is no channel to the regulator itself.

Tobique. The Tobique Gaming Commission (New Brunswick, Canada) says complaints can be filed from its licence validation page at validate.thetgc.ca, and that operators must provide an approved ADR service. We could not find an actual form on that page when we checked, only the sentence promising one, and complaints are accepted in English only. Treat it as unproven.

Independent mediators

Neither of these has any legal power. Both rely on the casino caring about its public rating.

Casino Guru assigns a mediator, contacts the casino directly and runs the case in public; its Safety Index is built on how casinos treated past complaints, which is the lever. Of some 42,000 complaints it has handled, about a third are marked resolved and more than half rejected — usually because the player broke a bonus or verification term. AskGamblers Casino Complaint Service works the same way, is free, and reports more than US$91 million returned to players since 2009; its own caveat is that “if you’ve broken the casino’s rules, you won’t get your money back”, and it cannot make a casino that ignores it respond.

If the casino is one we recommend, email us too. We pull ratings over unpaid withdrawals.

What the licence in the footer means

The small text at the bottom of a casino site tells you who, if anyone, can be asked to look at it. A Curaçao (CGA) licence now carries a written complaints procedure and a mandatory ADR route, which is more than it did before 2025 but is not a regulator that will arbitrate. Anjouan and Tobique impose an ADR requirement on paper and nothing you can invoke directly. A footer with a licence seal that does not click through to a validation page for that exact domain should be read as no licence at all.

And New Zealand?

New Zealand has copied the Australian design. The Online Casino Gambling Act 2026, in force since 1 May 2026 and administered by the Department of Internal Affairs, licenses up to 15 operators and bans credit cards and buy-now-pay-later at licensed sites; in Simpson Grierson’s words “it would not be illegal under the Act for consumers themselves to gamble with an unlicensed operator”. Unlicensed sites are prohibited from 1 December 2026 (1 June 2027 if they applied for a licence). Everything above about complaints applies equally to a New Zealander playing at an offshore site.

This is general information, not legal advice.