GAMSTOP has announced that more than 500,000 people have signed up for its self-exclusion list since its inception in 2018. [Image: Shutterstock.com]

GAMSTOP, the self-exclusion program that helps people block themselves from accessing UK Gambling Commission-licensed gambling sites, has revealed that more than 500,000 people have now self-excluded since its launch in April 2018.

April registrations for its service broke the monthly record, with 8,686 people signing up

The term lengths start at six months and go up to a five-year reversible ban; 440,000 people are currently on the list. GAMSTOP also noted that April registrations for its service broke the monthly record, with 8,686 people signing up. This comes off the back of a record-breaking year in 2023 when more than 92,000 individuals joined.

A concerning trend was the proportion of younger people registering, as every other person who signed up in the first half of 2024 was between 16 and 35 years old. Safer gambling advocates hope that National Self-Exclusion Day on September 12 across soccer clubs in England will raise awareness of the services out there.

Talking about the milestone, GAMSTOP CEO Fiona Palmer said that the organization is proud to have helped “hundreds of thousands of people to take back control of their lives through self-exclusion.”

GAMSTOP is widely lauded as a great service for problem gamblers, with a recent independent survey of users saying that 78% of them believe it delivered the desired results.