Banning the use of credit cards for gambling may seem like a reasonable measure, aimed at preventing people from using "future money" to indulge in gambling and fall into financial difficulties. However, reality is far more complex than this logic. Is this ban a rational decision, a moral stance, or merely a superficial measure?
The UK was the first to implement a credit card ban in 2020, followed by several other countries. Studies have shown that the ban indeed increases the "friction" when players make deposits, but does it reduce addictive gambling behavior? Not necessarily.
A survey by NatCen found that those with existing gambling problems still borrow money, take out loans, and use non-credit card channels to continue gambling, even turning to more dangerous lending methods such as payday loans and informal borrowing. The superficial prohibition actually leads players to more uncontrollable and less regulated underground financial paths.
Moreover, this ban also weakens the financial institutions' ability to monitor players' fund activities. Traditional credit card transactions were a powerful tool for tracking risky behaviors. Once deprived, operators find it harder to identify abnormal spending behaviors, losing critical data needed for responsible gambling. Ironically, using credit cards at least had a refund mechanism to provide some protection for players, which is almost non-existent in other channels.
From a technical and payment perspective, credit cards were never designed as a tool for gambling. They have low payment efficiency, low acceptance rates, high fees, and often come with high cash advance costs. More importantly, data shows that credit cards account for only a small percentage of gambling payments, 5%-10% in the US and mostly small deposits in the UK. The actual impact of forcibly removing this channel is much smaller than imagined, but its symbolic significance is overly exaggerated.
Supporters of the ban might see it as a player protection mechanism, but in practice, this "friction" does not stop high-risk users, who simply find another way to continue gambling. Data also shows that even with the credit card ban, up to 96% or more of gambling deposits still come from "debt accounts"—overdraft accounts or soft credit forms of funds.
Therefore, the issue is not "whether people should gamble with borrowed money," but whether regulatory thinking is outdated. Blocking credit cards is merely an illusion of solving the problem, replacing a relatively controllable tool with a less controllable one. You stopped credit cards, not credit. On the contrary, it lost transparency, reducing the industry's ability to identify and intervene with problem players.
In fact, for most players, using credit cards does not necessarily equate to problematic behavior. Research shows that the vast majority of users who gamble with credit cards do not exhibit any risk signs. The problem group is a very small minority, yet the ban indiscriminately excludes everyone, lacking precision and fairness.
The most absurd part is that this policy actually benefits operators—they no longer have to deal with complex refund processes, handle disputes, or pay some of the transaction fees. In some ways, this has completely deviated from the original legislative intent of "protecting consumers."
In the end, the credit card ban is a typical case of regulatory bodies trying to address complex issues with simple measures. It cannot truly prevent people from gambling with borrowed money, nor can it replace in-depth, effective affordability checks and personalized risk identification mechanisms. When we discuss gambling harm prevention, the real focus should not be on "blocking payment channels," but on how to establish a more precise, smarter, and more responsible intervention system.
So, is this ban based on common sense, or is it a "seemingly useful, actually ineffective" institutional illusion? I tend to believe the latter. This is not a victory for player protection, but a failure of regulatory simplification.
