The online wagering credit card ban: what changed, which payments it covers and where it stops

What the law now says

The ban lives in Part 2B of the Interactive Gambling Act 2001, headed Prohibitions relating to credit and digital currency for certain interactive wagering services. The Act's own one-paragraph outline of Part 2B says that credit must not be provided to customers of certain interactive wagering services, and that such services must not accept or offer to accept payment using specified methods, including credit cards and digital currency.

Section 15C contains two separate prohibitions. The first stops a provider from giving, or offering, credit to a customer in Australia, and from facilitating or promoting credit offered by a third party. The second, the part most people mean by the credit card ban, stops a provider from accepting, or offering to accept, payment by one of the listed methods from a customer or prospective customer who is physically present in Australia.

The credit limb was not entirely new. Under the National Consumer Protection Framework for online wagering, agreed by the Commonwealth, states and territories, licensed providers were already barred from offering lines of credit, and links to payday lenders were discouraged, from 17 February 2018, according to the Department of Social Services gambling reforms page. What the 2023 amendment added was a Commonwealth offence with real penalties, and a separate ban on the payment instruments themselves. In other words, it moved the question from whether the bookmaker lends money to whether the customer's deposit is borrowed money at all. The framework is set out in more detail in the national framework explainer.

Timeline: from bill to commencement

The amending law is the Interactive Gambling Amendment (Credit and Other Measures) Act 2023, Act No. 114 of 2023. Its commencement table, published on the Federal Register of Legislation, splits the start dates.

The six-month gap gave wagering providers and banks time to change their payment set-ups. The enforcement part, which arrived first, gave the ACMA new tools across the Act: enforceable undertakings, remedial directions and a rule that each day of a continuing contravention is a separate contravention.

Which payment methods are covered

Subsection 15C(4A) lists the banned methods exactly. There are four.

1. A credit card.
2. An account, service or facility in which payment is made from a credit card linked to it. This catches digital wallets and similar services when the funding source behind them is a credit card.
3. Digital currency, which captures cryptocurrency deposits.
4. Any other method of a kind the Minister determines by legislative instrument. This is a reserve power to add methods without amending the Act.

The list does not mention debit cards, bank transfers or real-time payments. Methods that are not on the list and not added by the Minister remain lawful for licensed wagering providers to accept. The practical table below follows directly from the statutory list; it is an illustration, not a statement about any particular operator.

For a general overview of how these payment rails work, see the payments hub and the page on credit card payments.

Exceptions written into the Act

Section 15C is not absolute. Three exceptions appear in the text.

• Customer location not knowable. The prohibitions do not apply if the provider did not know, and could not with reasonable diligence have found out, that the customer was physically present in Australia. A separate defence covers a provider that could not reasonably have known it was accepting a banned method. The Act lists what a court must weigh, including whether customers were told about the Australian prohibition, what personal details they gave, and network data showing where they were.
• Small telephone bookmakers giving credit. Section 15D lets a telephone betting service offer credit where dealings are wholly by voice call, the provider's (or its corporate group's) annual wagering turnover is under $30 million, and the provider's wagering staff have worked at an Australian racecourse. This exception applies only to the credit prohibition, not to the payment-method ban.
• Customer is itself a gambling provider. Section 15E excludes situations where the customer is the provider of a gambling service, for example one bookmaker laying off with another.

Penalties and enforcement

Each prohibition is both a criminal offence and a civil penalty provision. The offence carries 500 penalty units; the civil penalty is 750 penalty units. Under subsections 15C(2) and (4), a contravention that continues is treated as a separate offence or contravention for each day it continues, so a payment system left switched on for a month counts thirty or so times over.

The ACMA monitors compliance. In its compliance priority report for 2024–25, the ACMA said it found a very high level of compliance with the credit card and crypto ban and had not commenced any investigations into it, according to the ACMA compliance report.

What the ban does not touch

The ban is tied to a specific category in the Act: a regulated interactive gambling service that is a wagering service. That shapes its edges.

• Lotteries. The ACMA's page on the credit ban says it does not apply to other gambling products such as lotteries.
• Online keno. Online keno is classed under the Act as an excluded lottery service rather than a wagering service, so it falls outside section 15C. A departmental review published in January 2026 recommended prohibiting credit card payments for online keno and foreign-matched lotteries; as far as the sources checked for this article show, that is a recommendation and not yet law.
• Land-based gambling. Credit at pubs, clubs and casinos is a matter for state and territory law and is not affected by section 15C.

Why offshore online casinos are a different case

Offshore sites offering online casino games or online pokies to Australians are not regulated interactive gambling services at all. Offering them is already prohibited outright by section 15 of the Act, with an offence of 5,000 penalty units and a civil penalty of 7,500 penalty units per day. Because the operator is already acting unlawfully under section 15, the narrower credit rules in section 15C were never the main lever against them. The Act does not make it an offence for an individual in Australia to play, but a player who funds such an account has no Australian regulator to complain to if a withdrawal is refused. More on that in the explainer on ACMA website blocking.

That gap is being narrowed from the payments side. The Interactive Gambling Amendment (Gambling Reform) Act 2026 inserts a new Part 2C, commencing 1 January 2027, that requires authorised deposit-taking institutions and payment system participants to prevent, so far as reasonably practicable, payments from accounts held in Australia to providers of prohibited or unlicensed gambling services and their associates. The civil penalty is 1,000 penalty units, and the Act defines funds for this purpose to include digital currency. Banks acting in good faith are protected from civil claims, but a block must be reversed within 28 days if the bank decides the payment was not caught.

A worked example of why credit was targeted

The policy case for the ban is that gambling with borrowed money compounds losses. A simple illustration with round numbers, labelled as an example only: a person deposits $500 to a wagering account on a credit card that charges cash-advance interest of 20 per cent a year, loses the $500, and pays the card down at $50 a month. Ignoring fees, the balance takes about 11 months to clear and costs roughly $50 in interest, so the $500 bet ends up costing about $550. The same loss on a debit card costs $500 and is capped by the money actually in the account. Rates and fees vary by card; the point is the structure, not the figures.

If gambling is causing money problems, Gambling Help Online offers free, confidential support on 1800 858 858, and licensed wagering accounts can be closed across the board through BetStop. See also the responsible gambling page.

Questions readers ask

Sources

Every figure and date in this article comes from the documents below; we re-check them when a source changes.

1. Interactive Gambling Act 2001, Compilation No. 24, Part 2B (Federal Register of Legislation)
2. Interactive Gambling Amendment (Credit and Other Measures) Act 2023, No. 114
3. Interactive Gambling Amendment (Gambling Reform) Act 2026, Schedule 2
4. ACMA — Credit ban
5. Department of Social Services — Gambling reforms (National Consumer Protection Framework measures)
6. ACMA — Compliance priority 2024–25: interactive gambling safeguards
7. Department of Infrastructure — Review into the regulation of online keno and foreign-matched lotteries (January 2026)

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