Casinos Advertising Pay-by-Phone Deposits in Australia: What the ACMA Has Done in 2026

A casino that lets an Australian customer fund a balance by charging it to their mobile phone bill or a landline account looks, on the surface, like just another payment method. The mechanics are simple: a transaction posts to a phone bill, the play balance is credited in real time, and no card or bank detail ever leaves the customer’s device. What that surface description quietly skips is the legal architecture underneath. In Australia, no state or territory licenses an online casino game or an online pokie. Anything offering phone-billed deposits to Australians does so from outside the country, on terms the Australian Communications and Media Authority has spent years dismantling one round at a time. This page traces what that landscape actually looks like in 2026: how the prohibition is written, what carrier billing does and doesn’t do, which offshore brands the ACMA has named, and what the cumulative blocking totals reveal about the pace of enforcement.

Data current as of 20 October 2026, verified against the ACMA’s formal-warning register and the published text of the Interactive Gambling Act 2001.

The Australian prohibition and the offshore phone-billing claim

The single legal fact an Australian player needs about any casino advertising phone-bill deposits is that none of them can be licensed here. No state or territory issues a licence for an online casino game or an online pokie. The Interactive Gambling Act 2001, strengthened by the Interactive Gambling Amendment Act 2017, makes the provision of those services to a person in Australia an offence, and the Interactive Gambling Amendment (Gambling Reform) Bill 2026 — passed on 19 August 2026 — adds advertising and inducement measures that commence on 1 January 2027. The current text targets the operator, not the individual player, but the practical consequence for the player is no Australian consumer protection, no local complaints body and no Australian court to chase a withdrawal that does not arrive. Offshore casinos keep offering phone billing because the deposit converts cleanly to the operator’s currency, the customer’s charge sits on a mobile or landline account they already trust, and the casino never has to handle the card or bank detail Australians have grown cautious about surrendering to an unknown site.

Fundamentals of the prohibition: how the IGA actually works

The Interactive Gambling Act 2001 draws a hard line between the gambling Australians can place online and the gambling they cannot. Wagering on a race or a sporting event placed before the event, lotteries and keno are licensable; in practice those licences sit with the Northern Territory Racing and Wagering Commission, which regulates 52 of Australia’s online bookmakers — including Sportsbet, Bet365 and Ladbrokes — and runs without full-time staff, meeting once a month in Darwin. Online casino games, online pokies and in-play betting are prohibited interactive gambling services under the same Act, and that classification carries the operational meaning: an Australian licence cannot be issued for them, no matter how the operator wraps the offering. The penalty is civil and criminal against the provider, not the player, but the consequence is structural. An offshore casino licensed in Curaçao, in Anjouan, in Costa Rica or anywhere else is still prohibited from supplying those games to a person physically in Australia, and the operator displays that licence at its own risk.

The 2017 amendments turned the Act from a statement of intent into something the ACMA could actually act on. Section 15A directs the regulator to notify an internet service provider that a service is being provided in breach of the Act, and the ISP is required to give effect to a written notice from the ACMA by disabling access. The blocking regime that has followed is the same one that, by mid-2026, had taken 1,751 illegal gambling and affiliate marketing websites out of reach of Australian customers since the first blocking request in November 2019. The minimum age to gamble online in Australia is 18, the same age at which the law expects a phone-billed deposit to be made from a customer’s own account. The IGA does not say the player commits an offence by depositing; it says the operator commits an offence by accepting the deposit from a person in Australia. That distinction is the one that lets offshore marketing keep running, even when the ACMA has named the brand by name.

What the Act does not do is grant any Australian authority a reciprocal right to refund a player’s losses, force a withdrawal, or compel an offshore operator to honour a bonus term the player believed they had. The Interactive Gambling Act targets provision; consumer protection is a separate question, and offshore casinos fall outside it. That gap is the actual cost of the prohibition’s enforcement-only structure: an Australian who deposits by phone bill at an unlicensed site has paid for the convenience, accepted that their phone bill carries a charge from a brand they may not be able to name in a year, and is on their own if anything goes sideways. The credit-card ban that came into force for licensed online wagering on 11 June 2024 — with penalties up to A$247,500 for operators — does not reach offshore casinos either, because the ban applies to Australian-licensed services, not to the offshore sites the IGA already prohibits. An Australian-licensed bookmaker using PayID, BPAY or a debit card is bound by all of this; an offshore phone-bill casino is bound by none of it.

The prohibition in practice: how the ACMA enforces it

The ACMA does not ban offshore casinos directly; it issues formal warnings, requests internet service providers to block specific domains, and publishes the names of the operators it has acted against. By 26 June 2026, a round reported that day took the cumulative blocking count to 1,751 illegal gambling and affiliate marketing websites, with the regulator naming 12 new sites in that single request: 7Signs, ChromaBet, Donbet, Duospin, Freshbet, Slots Gem, Jacks Club, Lucky Start, Pointsbetz.com, Spinrise, Vinyl Casino and Wildsino. The blocking requests are the visible edge of the regime; the formal warnings are the earlier step. An ACMA formal warning is published on the regulator’s site, names the operating company behind the brand, and signals that the next round may include that brand’s domains in a blocking request. Since 2017, more than 230 unlicensed gambling services have left the Australian market entirely, whether through blocking, through formal pressure, or through their own decision that running a brand here is no longer worth the attention.

The recent warning log is dense enough that the regulator’s list reads like a roster of offshore operators. In March 2026 the ACMA warned Pulsup Ltd over Rocketplay.com.au. In May 2022 the regulator had already warned Dama N.V. over six brands — Bambet, Dazard, Level Up, Rocketplay, Wild Tornado and Cobra Casinos — and then issued further warnings over Woo Casino in March 2025 and Spirit Casino in May 2025. In July 2025 the warnings covered Bamboo Media over Ignition Casino and Consolutetish S.R.L. over National Casino and Bizzo Casino; Bizzo Casino had already been the subject of a 2022 warning to TechSolutions (CY) Group Limited and TechSolutions Group N.V. In February 2025 EOD Code SRL was warned over Instant Casino. In April 2026 Ryker B.V. was warned over Jackbit and CasinOK. In April 2025 Sterplay Holding Ltd was warned over Casino Intense. The Hollycorn N.V. warning, published by the ACMA in September 2022, names Sky Crown and Blue Leo. The cumulative pattern is the point: the ACMA is not naming one or two brands; it is running through the operator roster, with the same holding company showing up under different names across different years.

What does a formal warning actually mean for the brand? An ACMA formal warning is a public step, on the record, with a named operator and a named brand. It precedes the next stage — a blocking request to Australian ISPs — and once a brand’s domains are blocked, the customer finds the site simply does not load from an Australian IP. The brand can rebrand, register a fresh domain, and start again, which is why the cumulative count of 1,751 sites is a count of blocking requests, not of unique businesses. The named operators recur. Dama N.V. alone has had warnings covering six brands in 2022 and a further two in 2025, which is one company reappearing four times across the register. The blocking log, read carefully, is a map of the same offshore holding companies running different brand fronts across different years. H2 Gambling Capital’s 2025 estimate puts Australian losses to illegal gambling sites at roughly A$3.9 billion a year, and shows the share going through legal channels dropping from 74% in 2021 to 64% — a number that tells the regulator’s enforcement job is not getting smaller, even as the blocking count grows.

Responsible gaming when the casino sits outside BetStop

The Australian consumer-protection architecture for online gambling is built around licensed operators, and an offshore phone-bill casino is not part of it. BetStop, the National Self-Exclusion Register, has been live since August 2023 and lets a person exclude themselves from every Australian-licensed online and phone wagering service at once. The exclusion is binding only on the Australian wagering services connected to it — the Northern Territory-licensed bookmakers, the lottery operators, the keno services. An offshore casino offering phone-billed deposits is not on BetStop because it is not a member of the Australian scheme, and the exclusion a person has registered does not extend to it. That is the practical consequence for someone trying to use the BetStop register as a blanket stop on their own gambling: the register protects them only at the licensed end of the market.

The National Gambling Helpline — 1800 858 858 — is free, runs 24 hours a day, and connects to Gambling Help Online, which offers chat. Both services are funded by the Australian government’s response to problem gambling and operate independently of any casino operator, licensed or otherwise. They take calls from people who want to talk about gambling harm, who want help to set up a BetStop exclusion that the licensed operators will honour, and who want information on a family member or partner’s gambling. The phone-billed casino is not part of any of those arrangements, but the support services are. The Australian bank gambling blocks — Westpac’s merchant-category-code block and ANZ’s app-toggled block, both of which refuse authorisation on transactions coded as Betting/Casino Gambling — operate at a different layer and constrain where a phone-billed casino can route a deposit if the customer’s card or wallet is the underlying rail.

The reality for someone using phone billing is that the bets-and-losses dimension of responsible gaming is invisible to the Australian framework. BetStop cannot see the deposits. The bank blocks target card and wallet transactions, not the charge that ends up on the customer’s phone bill. The helpline can listen and advise, but it cannot see the offshore brand. An Australian who wants to manage their own gambling around a phone-billed offshore casino is doing it without any of the Australian architecture they would have at a licensed bookmaker, and that absence is the operational meaning of “not on BetStop” in the marketing that surrounds these brands. ANZ’s block is worth pausing on for a moment: it activates in the ANZ app, blocks Gambling Transactions routed through a digital wallet such as Apple Pay on an eligible card, and removing it once it is on requires a 48-hour waiting period — but the bank’s own warning is that not all gambling transactions will be blocked and some non-gambling transactions might be blocked in error. The block is a partial filter, not a wall.

Payments and settlement speed at phone-billing casinos

Phone billing is the deposit rail an offshore casino reaches for when it wants to convert an Australian’s balance top-up into something the customer’s existing account handles without a card. The mechanics split into two paths: Direct Carrier Billing, in which the charge posts to a mobile phone account and is collected by the carrier alongside the customer’s monthly bill; and landline billing, in which the charge appears on a home phone account in jurisdictions where that is still offered. The names blur in the marketing — “pay by phone”, “pay by mobile”, “pay by phone bill” — but the underlying instrument is the same: a small-value transaction, usually capped by the carrier, that the customer confirms with a one-time SMS PIN or a click-through on their phone’s browser.

Boku is the carrier-billing processor most often named in this market. The company describes its network as covering more than 200 local payment methods across more than 40 markets — wallets, account-to-account payments, and Direct Carrier Billing — and says it holds payment licences in more than 40 countries. Boku was founded in 2009 in London by Mark Britto, Erich Ringewald and Ron Hirson from the combined assets of Mobillcash Ltd. and Paymo, Inc., listed on the London Stock Exchange’s AIM market on 20 November 2017 through a £125 million initial public offering that same year it exceeded US$1 billion in annual payment volume, and trades under the ticker BOKU. Other providers named in the broader direct-carrier-billing space include Fonix, Bango, Fortumo and Google Pay. The settlement from the customer’s perspective is instant — the casino credits the play balance as soon as the carrier confirms the charge — but that is the casino’s choice, not a property of the rail; the underlying settlement between the carrier, the processor and the casino runs on its own schedule, which is one of several reasons a casino promising “instant deposits” tells the customer nothing about when withdrawals will be processed.

The contrast with the Australian-licensed rail matters at this point. PayID-based instant transfers are available at more than 100 Australian financial institutions, and an Osko transfer between participating banks arrives in under a minute, 24/7 including weekends, whether addressed to a BSB and account number or to a PayID. Paying to a PayID shows the name of the account holder before the transfer is sent, and the platform itself warns that being asked to transfer to a PayID on an illegal gambling site almost certainly means a scam site. Australia’s New Payments Platform became accessible to the public on 13 February 2018 and is owned by New Payments Platform Australia Ltd, whose 13 shareholders include the Reserve Bank of Australia and the major banks. By April 2025, more than 25 million PayID identifiers had been registered on the platform. The licensed-rail equivalent of the offshore phone-billed deposit, in other words, is a debit card or a PayID transfer to an Australian-licensed bookmaker — and the licensed bookmaker is bound by Australian rules that an offshore casino is not. The marketing claim of “no bank details shared” at an offshore phone-billed casino is technically true; what it actually describes is a deposit rail that has been routed around the framework Australian payments would otherwise expose the brand to.

Provider Overview

The deposit cap is the rail’s defining feature. Australian carriers cap direct-carrier-billed transactions at modest amounts — typically in the tens of dollars — to manage credit risk on what is, in regulatory terms, an unsecured credit extension the carrier is making to the customer. The cap is one reason phone-billed casinos market themselves as a low-stakes entry point: a customer cannot move thousands of dollars in a single phone-billed deposit, regardless of how much the casino is willing to accept. A second reason is that the deposit rail does not reverse cleanly — a carrier-billed charge is not a card transaction that can be charged back, it is a charge on the customer’s phone bill that the customer has authorised with a PIN. That asymmetry matters the moment a customer wants their money back: there is no chargeback route through Visa or Mastercard, no Section 18 of the Australian Consumer Law against the carrier, and no AUSTRAC threshold-transaction-report trigger unless physical cash crosses A$10,000 in a single transfer.

The marketing claim that customers make about phone-billed casinos, when they make one, is that “no bank details are shared”. That is true at the rail: the casino does not see the card or bank account. It is not true at the consequence layer: the customer has authorised a charge to a phone account the carrier will collect, the casino holds the credited balance on its own ledger, and the customer’s recourse if anything goes wrong runs through the carrier’s complaints process and the offshore operator’s terms — not through an Australian bank or regulator. Apple Pay sits in the picture as a foil: by the end of 2025, Apple Pay, Google Pay and Samsung Pay transactions collectively accounted for around 45% of all card payments in Australia by number, but the Interactive Gambling Act 2001 as amended in 2023 bars Australian-licensed online wagering from accepting credit cards or other credit-related products, which constrains gambling use of linked digital wallets. Apple does not charge consumer fees on Apple Pay — surcharges come from the merchant’s card-processing fees — and Apple states that transaction limits and PIN requirements are set by the card issuer or merchant, not by Apple. The licensed-rail path is heavily regulated; the phone-billed offshore path is, by design, outside that regulation.

Mobile and app experience at pay-by-phone casinos

A phone-billed deposit is, by construction, a mobile transaction. The customer authorises it on the device they are holding, the carrier’s confirmation arrives as an SMS, and the casino’s play interface runs in the mobile browser the customer has open. The “app” most phone-billed casinos offer is therefore not a downloadable application from a recognised app store in the usual sense; it is a mobile-optimised web front end that loads in the browser, accepts the deposit through the carrier-billing flow, and presents the games through HTML5 or through a wrapped web view. Apple and Google constrain what a real-money gambling app can look like on their stores in most jurisdictions, and an offshore casino is not in a position to ship one for Australian customers.

The deposit flow inside the mobile browser is what the customer actually sees. The cashier detects the mobile context and offers carrier billing as one of several deposit methods; the customer enters an amount; the casino pushes a request to the carrier; the carrier sends an SMS PIN; the customer enters the PIN; the play balance is credited. The same flow on a desktop browser is less common, because most desktop browsers cannot complete the SMS-PIN handshake without routing through the customer’s mobile, which is why some phone-billed casinos restrict the deposit to a mobile context in the first place. The interface is not the product — the rail is.

What the customer is doing throughout the flow is using a mobile browser on a phone that is also the device receiving the SMS confirmation. From a security standpoint, that is a reasonable arrangement: the customer is authorising a charge on a device they hold, in response to a code delivered to the same device. From a regulator’s standpoint, the same flow is what makes the deposit difficult to attribute to a third party: a charge that arrives as a PIN on a phone, that the customer has entered, looks like the customer’s own authorisation, and reversing it through the carrier requires the customer to claim they did not enter the PIN. That is the surface that has to be navigated if a phone-billed charge ever shows up on someone else’s mobile account.

The withdrawal question is where the mobile experience diverges sharply from the deposit experience. Phone billing is a one-way rail — the carrier collects a charge, it does not push funds out to a customer’s bank account. Withdrawals from an offshore phone-billed casino go through a different channel, usually a bank transfer, sometimes a card refund, sometimes a cryptocurrency payout. The “instant deposits, slow withdrawals” pattern is the rule rather than the exception at offshore casinos advertising carrier billing, and the asymmetry is the second of the rail’s defining features: a customer can fund a balance from their phone in seconds, and then wait days for the same balance to come back.

Games, providers and live tables at phone-billing casinos

The games on offer at a phone-billed offshore casino are the standard online casino catalogue: online slots, online pokies as the marketing tends to call them, table games — blackjack, roulette, baccarat — and a live dealer lobby streamed from studios in Malta, Latvia, Costa Rica and the Philippines. The catalogue does not change because the deposit rail is a phone bill; what changes is which games the marketing spotlight picks out. Online slots pay by landline phone bill, slots pay by landline phone bill, pay slots by phone bill — the search vocabulary for this shelf runs in a loop, and the titles the marketing names are the standard high-volatility online slots that dominate any offshore casino’s homepage.

The providers behind those games are the same studios whose content fills any offshore casino: Pragmatic Play, Evolution, NetEnt, the Microgaming successor catalogue, Play’n GO, Nolimit City and a long tail of smaller studios licensing into the Curaçao-licensed market. The ACMA’s enforcement is at the operator and brand level — the regulator names the casino and its operating company, not the game studio supplying the slots — so the same provider can have its games running on a brand the ACMA has just blocked, and on another brand that has not yet been named. The provider’s exposure is contractual and reputational; the operator’s exposure is regulatory.

Live dealer lobbies are the part of the catalogue where the offshore operator’s structure is most visible. A live table streams from a studio the operator has contracted with — typically not the operator’s own studio — and the table’s outcome is set by a real wheel, real cards and a real dealer, all running on the provider’s platform. A customer playing live roulette at an offshore phone-billed casino is interacting with a provider whose software the casino has integrated, not with a casino that has built its own live product. The credit and the debit on the customer’s play balance sits on the casino’s ledger; the game on the screen runs on the provider’s. When the ACMA blocks the casino, the games stop loading through the casino’s site, but the provider’s terms with the casino are unaffected.

What this shelf of the catalogue shows, read alongside the rest of the page, is that the “phone bill” framing is incidental to the games. A slot is a slot regardless of whether the customer’s last deposit was charged to a phone bill or funded from a bank transfer. The phone bill is the deposit rail; the games are the same games any offshore casino offers. The play balance, the wagering turnover, the bonus terms, the volatility of any particular slot — none of those change because the deposit went through a phone bill. The only thing the phone bill changes is the customer-side experience of getting money in. Everything downstream of the credit runs on the same terms as at any other offshore casino, including the absence of any Australian protection if a withdrawal stalls.

Eleven Australian-facing offshore brands the ACMA has acted against

The table below summarises the eleven brands covered in the operator profiles that follow, drawing on the ACMA’s formal-warning register. “Subject support” describes whether a public source confirms the brand’s pay-by-phone-billing posture: “confirmed” means a named source ties the brand to the deposit method; “listings-only” means a third-party listing mentions the method but the brand itself does not confirm; “no-data” means neither the brand nor a listing has been verified for this subject. The reader should treat every brand in this table as an offshore operator with no Australian licence; the column describes whether the marketing claim about phone billing is verifiable, not whether the brand is licensed.

The eleven brands are not a ranking. They are the names the ACMA itself has published in formal warnings for offering prohibited interactive gambling services to Australians. Several of them sit under the same offshore holding company, which is why Dama N.V., Consolutetish S.R.L. and Hollycorn N.V. each appear against more than one brand on the list. Reading the table as a ranking of “best” or “safest” misses what it is: a register of named operators, and the dates on which the regulator went on the record about each. The em-dash in the “Subject support” column marks brands for which no third-party listing has confirmed a pay-by-phone-billing rail in the sources the research has surfaced; listings-only marks the brands whose appearance in third-party material is the only verifiable trace of the rail. None of these brands is licensed in Australia, and the ACMA register treats each as a prohibited interactive gambling service regardless of the rail.

The broader landscape of pay-by-phone casinos

Outside Australia, the pay-by-phone-billing casino is a niche product rather than a mainstream one. In the United Kingdom, where the Gambling Commission licenses online casinos, phone-billed deposits are accepted at a small number of white-label and Curaçao-licensed brands, with deposit caps that mirror the carrier’s terms and a marketing message that pitches phone billing as a low-friction alternative to debit cards. In European markets, the same pattern repeats: a phone-billed deposit cap, a small operator footprint, and a marketing message aimed at customers who do not want to enter card details. The Boku footprint of “200+ local payment methods in 40+ markets” is the supply side of that picture: a network of carrier relationships the operator can plug into without standing up its own payment infrastructure.

The deposit cap is the rail’s structural advantage in any jurisdiction. A customer cannot move A$1,000 through a single phone-billed deposit because the carrier will not let them, which means the rail is, by construction, a low-stakes entry point. Operators marketing phone billing to high-stakes players are not selling what the rail actually delivers: the rail delivers small, frequent deposits with no card detail, not large lump-sum top-ups. A customer who reads the marketing as “easy to deposit large amounts” has been sold a description of the rail that does not match how the carrier bills it.

The same Boku description covers “wallets, account-to-account payments and Direct Carrier Billing”, which is the rail family the marketing tends to bundle together. A mobile wallet deposit at an offshore casino is not the same instrument as a Direct Carrier Billing deposit: a wallet deposit pulls from a balance the customer has funded on a payment app; a Direct Carrier Billing deposit pulls from the customer’s phone bill. The marketing frequently blurs the distinction, and the customer’s recourse if anything goes wrong runs through different complaint routes — the wallet provider in the first case, the carrier in the second. The two are not interchangeable, even when both appear on the same cashier page.

The offshore-only nature of phone-billed casino play for Australians is the practical limit of this landscape. There is no Australian-licensed casino accepting phone-billed deposits, because there is no Australian-licensed casino at all. The relevant comparison for an Australian player is not between phone billing and card deposits at a licensed operator; the comparison is between phone billing at an offshore casino and not playing at all, with licensed wagering available on races, sports, lotteries and keno through the Northern Territory-licensed bookmakers that do accept payment by PayID, BPAY and debit card. The IGA’s architecture — prohibition for casino games, licensing for wagering — is the structural reason the comparison never lands on an Australian-licensed phone-billed casino, no matter how the marketing pitches it.

Operator profiles

Each profile below describes one of the eleven brands the ACMA has formally warned over offering prohibited interactive gambling services to Australians. The “subject support” column from the comparison table is reproduced where relevant: where research has not found a confirmation that the brand actually accepts pay-by-phone-billing deposits, the profile makes that gap visible rather than asserting a marketing claim.

RocketPlay — the brand re-warned in 2026 under a new operator

RocketPlay has had two ACMA formal warnings on the public record: an earlier one covering Dama N.V. in May 2022, and a more recent one naming Pulsup Ltd in March 2026. The 2026 warning is the only Pulsup Ltd warning on the register so far, and the brand sits at the most recent end of the regulator’s timeline. No public source has been verified confirming RocketPlay’s acceptance of pay-by-phone-billing deposits; the brand is not associated with the rail in any third-party listing the research has surfaced, so the “phone bill” framing for RocketPlay runs through the marketing vocabulary rather than through a documented cashier flow. The consequence for an Australian customer encountering RocketPlay through a search result is straightforward: the brand has been warned twice, the operator behind it has changed at least once, and the Australian-licensed alternative to the products on offer is the Northern Territory bookmakers. The 2026 Pulsup warning is the signal that the regulator is still prepared to name new operator entities, not only revisit ones already on the register.

Level Up Casino — one of Dama N.V.’s 2022 batch of six

Level Up Casino was named in Dama N.V.’s 2022 batch of six brands. The 2022 warning remains the primary regulatory signal for this operator in the context of this brand. No independent verification of the pay-by-phone rail exists.

Woo Casino — the first Dama N.V. brand re-warned after 2022

Woo Casino is on the register twice through Dama N.V., with the most recent warning in March 2025. It illustrates the ‘same operator, multiple brands’ pattern. For an Australian customer, this repetition signals the persistent nature of offshore enforcement challenges.

Spirit Casino — the latest Dama N.V. entry on the register

Spirit Casino is the most recent Dama N.V. warning on the register, dated May 2025. It shares the same operator record as other Dama N.V. brands. For an Australian customer, it represents the ongoing challenge of cumulative enforcement against multi-brand operators.

National Casino — named alongside Bizzo Casino in the 2025 Consolutetish S.R.L. warning

National Casino was named in the July 2025 warning over Consolutetish S.R.L. It is the first and only entry for this operator. No independent verification confirms the pay-by-phone rail.

Bizzo Casino — the brand the ACMA has named twice under two operators

Bizzo Casino has appeared twice on the ACMA register: 2022 (TechSolutions) and 2025 (Consolutetish S.R.L.). This highlights the regulator’s tendency to revisit brands when operators shift, rather than treating a first warning as the final enforcement action.

Ignition Casino — the only Bamboo Media entry on the register

Ignition Casino was named in the July 2025 warning over Bamboo Media. It is the only entry on the regulator’s record for this operator. No public source confirms the brand’s pay-by-phone acceptance.

Instant Casino — the only EOD Code SRL entry on the register

Instant Casino was named in the February 2025 warning over EOD Code SRL, and the brand’s only entry on the ACMA register is that warning. Subject support for Instant Casino’s pay-by-phone-billing acceptance is listings-only: third-party listings describe the brand in terms consistent with phone billing, but the brand’s own published terms have not been verified as confirming the rail. For an Australian customer, the Instant Casino profile is an example of a brand whose marketing reach to Australian customers sits behind an operator the ACMA has named, and whose acceptance of phone-billed deposits is supported only by third-party listing material rather than by a first-party source. The risk profile is the same as the rest of the table: an offshore operator, no Australian consumer protection, and a deposit rail that runs outside any Australian regulatory framework.

Jackbit — the most recent Ryker B.V. warning, alongside CasinOK

Jackbit was named in the April 2026 warning over Ryker B.V. It is the only entry on the regulator’s record for this brand. No public source confirms the brand’s pay-by-phone acceptance.

Casino Intense — the only Sterplay Holding Ltd entry on the register

Casino Intense was named in the April 2025 warning over Sterplay Holding Ltd. The brand has appeared in only one ACMA formal warning, and Sterplay Holding Ltd’s only entry on the regulator’s record is this one. Subject support for Casino Intense’s pay-by-phone-billing acceptance is listings-only: third-party listings mention the brand in terms consistent with phone billing, but the brand’s own published terms have not been verified as confirming the rail. For an Australian customer, the Casino Intense profile is an example of a brand whose marketing reach to Australian customers sits behind an operator the ACMA has named, and whose acceptance of phone-billed deposits is supported only by third-party listing material. The April 2025 date puts the warning in the middle of the regulator’s recent activity, and the brand sits alongside the entries that have appeared throughout 2025.

Sky Crown — the oldest Hollycorn N.V. entry, dating to 2022

Sky Crown was named in the September 2022 warning over Hollycorn N.V. It remains the only entry for the brand and the operator on the register. No public source confirms the pay-by-phone rail.

What the ACMA’s blocking rate actually means

The headline number from the ACMA’s recent rounds is 1,751 illegal gambling and affiliate marketing websites blocked since the first blocking request in November 2019. Spread across the roughly 79 months between November 2019 and the regulator’s June 2026 update, that is an average of roughly 22 sites blocked per month, or about one site every 33 hours. The band that comes out of the cumulative arithmetic runs from about 20 to 25 sites per month, depending on whether the end point sits at the June 2026 update or at a later reading within 2026. The condition that determines the band is the date the regulator’s total is read at — the count is cumulative, so each additional month pushes the per-month average down by a small fraction. Read at June 2026 the rate sits at the upper end of the band; read at 20 October 2026 it sits at the lower end.

What the rate does not show is the underlying population. The blocking count is the number of blocking requests, not the number of unique businesses, and a single offshore operator can hold many brands across many domains — Dama N.V.’s six brands in 2022 alone span six domains, and the same operator’s later warnings added two more. The 22-sites-per-month average is therefore a count of domains disabled at a moment in time, against an offshore operator set that registers fresh domains as fast as the regulator blocks old ones. The blocking rate, read alongside the warning register, is a description of how often the ACMA is acting, not of how fast the offshore market is shrinking. The June 2026 round’s 12-site single request is itself more than half of one month’s average added in one action, which is the cleanest illustration of how unevenly the cumulative total accumulates.

Frequently asked questions

How does paying by phone bill actually work as a deposit method at a casino?

The customer enters a deposit amount at the casino cashier, the cashier sends the request to the customer’s mobile carrier, the carrier sends an SMS PIN to the customer’s phone, and the customer enters the PIN to authorise the charge. The play balance is credited once the carrier confirms. The charge then appears on the customer’s mobile phone bill and is collected by the carrier on its regular billing cycle. The deposit cap is set by the carrier, typically in the tens of dollars per transaction.

Does using carrier billing make an offshore casino any more legitimate for Australian players?

No. The deposit rail does not change the operator’s legal status. Australian-licensed wagering services cannot accept credit cards or credit-related products under the Interactive Gambling Act 2001, but no Australian licence covers online casino games at all, so the relevant comparison for an offshore phone-bill casino is not with an Australian-licensed operator. The casino remains offshore, the operator remains unconnected to BetStop, and the customer’s recourse runs through the carrier and the offshore operator’s terms.

Is depositing via a mobile phone bill to an offshore casino lawful for an Australian resident?

The Interactive Gambling Act 2001 targets the provider, not the player. An Australian resident depositing by phone bill at an offshore casino is not the target of the Act, but the deposit funds play at a casino offering prohibited interactive gambling services to Australians. The casino can be warned, blocked, and have its domains disabled by Australian ISPs, and the player’s balance can be left inaccessible if a block lands mid-session. The deposit itself is not an offence; the operator’s acceptance of it is.

What’s the difference between ‘pay by phone bill’ and ‘pay by mobile phone’ at a casino?

In practice, very little. Both terms usually describe Direct Carrier Billing, in which the deposit is charged to the customer’s mobile phone account. “Pay by mobile phone” is sometimes used more loosely to cover any deposit initiated from a mobile device, including mobile wallet payments from a balance the customer has already funded, which is a different instrument from a Direct Carrier Billing charge that lands on the phone bill itself.

What happens if a phone-bill casino charge shows up on someone else’s mobile account?

The customer receiving the SMS PIN is the person authorising the charge, regardless of whose mobile account the charge ultimately posts to. If the SMS was sent to a phone the customer does not own, or the PIN was entered by a person other than the account holder, the carrier’s complaints process is the relevant route. The casino’s role is to pass the request to the carrier; the carrier’s role is to verify the PIN against the account and collect the charge on its own cycle.