Algeria

Algeria maintains a closed state-monopoly gambling market with no private licensing pathway; the PSA lottery and sports pool and the PMU horse-racing tote remain the only lawful operators. The 2025 legislative wave, anchored in Law No. 25-10 of 24 July 2025, tightens enforcement of the offshore and online perimeter by criminalising the use of a VPN to bypass state blocking orders and access offshore gambling or crypto platforms. This is a civil-law jurisdiction where the statutory licensing stack (enabling law plus implementing measures) governs the field, and the current cycle's activity is entirely enforcement-oriented rather than liberalising. No new entrant, product vertical, or licensing category has emerged; the market's structural closure is unchanged, but the state's capacity to police circumvention of that closure has been extended into individual criminal liability.

No private gambling licensing framework exists in Algeria. The PSA operates the state lottery and sports pools under Ministry oversight, and PMU Algérie runs the horse-racing tote — both are state-monopoly exceptions to the general prohibition rather than open markets. Law 18-05 forecloses any online operator from a legal basis. There is no gambling commission and no process for private operators to obtain a licence.

Market entry is not possible. Layered legal prohibition, FATF grey-list AML exposure, foreign-exchange controls, and the 2025 crypto/VPN criminalisation make Algeria one of the harder prohibition jurisdictions for even informal operator access. An underground market persists via offshore (mostly European-licensed) operators and local cash-agent networks, but this carries criminal, reputational and payment risk for any operator with known Algeria traffic in its player file.

Banque d'Algérie maintains tight foreign-exchange and capital controls. Law 18-05 exempts only sub-threshold cross-border e-commerce from FX formalities, and gambling is expressly excluded from permitted e-commerce, so there is no lawful gambling payment channel. Cryptocurrency was criminalised by Law 25-10 in July 2025, eliminating that workaround. Algeria's FATF grey-list status (October 2024, MENAFATF member) requires enhanced due diligence on all Algeria-connected flows.

All private gambling marketing is banned. Law 18-05's e-commerce gambling ban covers online advertising and promotion, ARPCE blocks gambling landing pages, and Google has expanded its Gambling and Games policy to ban all gambling advertising targeting Algeria. No affiliate, sponsorship, or digital-marketing channel is lawfully available to private operators.

Google expanded its Gambling and Games advertising policy to ban all advertisements for offline gambling in Algeria, tightening the distribution and marketing channel available to any gambling-adjacent activity in the jurisdiction. This platform-level change compounds the country's existing prohibition-based posture: with online gambling already illegal and offline gambling limited to the PSA lottery and PMU tote, the removal of an advertising channel for offline gambling activity narrows further the commercial visibility available to any operator, licensed or otherwise, seeking to reach Algerian consumers through major digital advertising platforms. There is no countervailing liberalisation signal on the distribution side.

Enforcement in Algeria combines longstanding site-blocking under the Penal Code and Law 18-05 with a newly concrete case: Algerian police dismantled a network of local agents in Béjaïa organising illegal online gambling and processing cryptocurrency transactions. This is a direct instance of action against both the unlicensed online gambling activity and the crypto payment rail feeding it. Law No. 25-10 of 24 July 2025 reinforces the underlying legal basis, naming the Bank of Algeria, the Banking Commission and judicial authorities as the enforcement bodies responsible for extending criminal exposure to VPN-enabled access to offshore crypto and gambling platforms, and for the crypto payment-channel prohibition that compounds the existing ban on facilitating payments for offshore betting. Payment-processor and crypto-ramp providers face rising accessory-liability exposure given the bank-side prohibition on processing crypto-linked flows. Confidence on Law 25-10's precise statutory mechanics sits at Probable, since convergent secondary sources have not yet been corroborated against a directly retrieved Journal Officiel text.

No liberalisation is foreseeable. Prohibition is multi-layered across the Penal, Civil and Family Codes plus Law 18-05, and the published position is that no legislative reforms are contemplated and that the government is strengthening prohibitions. Algeria's FATF grey listing (October 2024 – 19 June 2026) created pressure for AML improvement rather than gambling liberalisation while it was in force; Algeria was removed from the grey list at the 19 June 2026 plenary and is not grey-listed as of 28 August 2026. The 2025 crypto/VPN criminalisation signals a continued tightening trajectory on the gambling-prohibition side, independent of the FATF delisting.