Five columns, three instruments, none aimed at the player

What stands in the blocked-websites list

The list appears on a web page, as a table, with five columns. The headers, word for word:

• id
• Blokkolt domain — blocked domain
• Tiltott szerencsejáték szervezést megvalósító szervezet vagy személy elnevezése — the name of the organisation or person carrying out the organisation of prohibited gambling
• bankAccount
• Megjegyzés — remarks

The second column carries subdomains as well as top-level addresses. The third names the organisation or person organising the prohibited game, where that could be established. The fourth holds a banking identifier.

At the foot of the page is a timestamp. When we opened it, it read: „Utolsó módosítás: 2026.08.31. 15:18" — last modified 31 August 2026, 15:18.

It is worth noticing whom those columns are about. A domain, an organisation, a bank account. None of them is about a player.

What the list does not reveal

There is no file to download. No table, no text extract. The content lives on the web page, paged twenty rows at a time, so anyone looking for a domain has to use the browser’s find function on the page currently open, or page all the way through.

No update schedule is published. The timestamp says when it was last touched, but nowhere does it say whether it grows weekly, monthly or case by case. Anyone writing "updated weekly" is asserting something the page itself does not state.

The serial number is not a count. When we looked, the identifier of the topmost record was 6,403, and the number of domains on the list does not follow from that. Several Hungarian summaries nonetheless report the figure as "this many sites are blocked"; exactly where that argument slips is set out in its own section below.

The date of entry is not visible. There is no date among the columns, only a single shared stamp at the foot of the page about the last modification. So for no individual row can you say when it went in, or when it was last amended.

How to search it for a specific address

The list pages twenty at a time, so the browser’s own search only ever finds something on the page currently open. Anyone looking for a domain either has to page all the way through, or set the pager control to a larger page size where that is possible.

Search for the subdomain too. The second column carries subdomains, so it can happen that the main address is absent while a subdomain is present.

Look at the third column as well. Going by the name of the organisation or person, several rows sometimes belong together, tied to the same organiser.

Finally, note down the timestamp at the foot of the page. Your hit, or the absence of one, belongs to that day, and the list may look different tomorrow.

The timestamp is the only time data on the whole page

Not one of the table’s five columns contains a date. The only time data is that single stamp at the foot of the page, and it applies to the whole register rather than to individual rows.

Three things follow, and all three are limits.

You cannot say when an address went on. There is no field among the rows from which that could be read, so this page does not answer the question "when was it blocked".

You cannot compare periods. Anyone writing that a given year saw this many more sites added is not working from this table, because the table shows no difference between two points in time.

And you cannot make your own reading timeless. Our claim belongs to a day as well: to 31 August 2026, because that is what the stamp said. What you find in it today may look different tomorrow, and the page says so itself.

What it means when a domain is on neither list

This is the most common case, and the easiest to misread.

The two registers answer two different questions. One says whom the Hungarian state has granted an authorisation; the other says whose address has been restricted. A domain can be missing from both at once.

What can be established in that case is that it holds no Hungarian authorisation, and that no restriction procedure carrying a public entry had been started against it up to the day on which you opened the list.

At least three things cannot be derived from that. It does not follow that anyone approved the site. It does not follow that it will still be off the list tomorrow. And it says nothing whatever about how the operator pays out, because that is settled by its contract, not by a Hungarian register.

An absence is therefore information — just very much less of it than is usually built on top.

The first instrument: restricting access to the domain

This is the best-known one. The authority establishes that prohibited gambling is being organised on a website, then initiates the restriction of access and enters the address in its register.

The addressee is the internet service provider.

Accordingly the measure aims at restricting access, not at holding a user to account. The rows are about domains, subdomains and the organisations behind them.

The second instrument: prohibiting payment accounts

There is an instrument on the money side too. Sections 13/A to 13/K of the szerencsejáték törvény, the Hungarian gambling act, are the legal basis for payment blocking, and the authority keeps a separate register of prohibited payment accounts for it.

We do not quote the text of those sections here, because we have not read them through, and equally we did not open the account register itself. What is visible from the other list, though, is that the two instruments are connected: the fourth column of the blocked-websites table holds a banking identifier, so the domain and the payment trail sit in the same record.

The addressee here is the payment service provider.

The third instrument: advertising

Advertising sites have a register of their own, and advertising carries its own fine. Under section 2 of the szerencsejáték törvény, the authority may impose on

„a reklámozót, a reklámszolgáltatót, a reklám közzétevőjét és a reklámban szereplő személyt egyetemlegesen … legalább 10 millió forint összegű közigazgatási bírsággal sújthatja"

— jointly and severally on the advertiser, the advertising service provider, the publisher and the person appearing in the advertisement, an administrative fine of at least 10 million forints.

That is the hardest item in the whole list, and it is worth seeing whom it names: advertiser, agency, publisher and face. The person playing is not in this one either. The full argument with quotations is on the page about the rules that apply to the player.

The third column, and what the organiser’s name is for

The third column of the table names the body or individual behind the prohibited game, where that could be established. It is the least-read column, and it says the most.

A domain on its own is not much information. The name of the organisation behind it, though, ties rows together: the same name can surface in several rows, and at that point it becomes clear that these are not separate matters but several addresses of the same organiser.

That search has a practical use. If a site you are looking at is not on the list but the company named in its footer is, then the company name will lead you to the sibling addresses that have already been entered.

The reverse holds too. Where no name stands in the column, the record is about the domain and says nothing about the organiser. It does not follow that there is no company behind it; it follows that the register does not print one.

The fourth column adds the payment trail to this. Domain, organiser and bank account in one record: those three items are the raw material of the authority’s three instruments, and that is why they sit in the same table.

We did not open the other two registers

We did not look at the list of blocked advertising sites or the list of prohibited payment accounts ourselves. What we know about them is that they exist and are reachable at their own addresses.

We do not write how many items they hold, what columns they have, or how often they update.

Writing about a register without opening it is precisely the move that our way of reading documents exists to prevent. The existence of the three instruments is nonetheless visible from this arrangement alone, because each has a separate address on the authority’s site.

What you will certainly not learn from this page

We do not describe how a restricted site might be reached anyway. No tool, no setting, no workaround, not even in "don’t do it this way" form.

That is not caution but an editorial rule: a description like that is a set of instructions however it is wrapped.

What happens to the money if a site comes under restriction

Hungarian legislation gives no answer to that, because the Hungarian instruments direct service providers and do not govern the settlement between operator and player.

The settlement is governed by the operator’s own terms. Specifically by the withdrawal section, and it is worth reading before a deposit: of ten operators, four publish a payout ceiling, at four we found no such figure even after reading the terms through, and at one we could not read the text out at all. What that means in amounts is on the page about identity checks and payouts.

Why the six-thousand serial number is not a count

This is the most misread figure on the page, and it is worth taking apart.

The first column of the table is an identifier. Every record entered gets one, and the numbering runs continuously forward. When we looked, the topmost record’s identifier was 6,403.

But a continuous identifier does not tell you how many records are on the list now. If a row comes off, its identifier is not reissued, so the numbering stays higher than the actual item count.

Then there is the paging. The list arrives in screens of twenty with nothing to export, so establishing a count would mean paging through the whole thing and noting how many rows there actually are.

So anyone writing "more than six thousand sites have been blocked in Hungary" is reporting an identifier as a quantity. The difference is not negligible, because even the direction of the number is uncertain: a serial number says something about the cumulative total of records ever entered, not about how many are in there today.

That is why we write "serial number" everywhere, and why we publish no estimated item count beside it.

What the list can and cannot be used for

It can be used to find out about a specific domain whether the Hungarian authority has restricted access to it. That is the one question the state answers directly, free, for everybody.

It cannot be used to find out whether an operator is authorised anywhere in the world. The question of Hungarian authorisation is answered by the authority’s permit list, and a foreign one can be checked in the register of the country that issued it. What can be read out of a number is again a different source.

Nor can it tell you when, or in what procedure, an address went on the list. The table does not publish that, and we do not infer it.

And it cannot be used to establish what happens to the player. Going on the list is an instruction to service providers, not a measure against a user.

That distinction is demonstrable throughout the wording of the legislation, and it is not an inference: the addressees are named in the sections that list the penalties.

Frequently asked questions