Cambodia Orders Every Casino to Stop Running Online Betting From October

Prime Minister Hun Manet has ordered a nationwide suspension of live online betting operated from casino premises, with licence revocation for anyone who ignores it. Play resumes only once the government has built the legal and digital controls it says are missing, and the order arrives days after the regulator began drafting a suitability test for licence renewals.

• Cambodia will suspend online betting operations run from casino premises nationwide from October, on the order of Prime Minister Hun Manet
• Casinos that breach the order risk losing their licences, and authorities have said operations may resume only once stronger safeguards are in place
• The government frames the move as part of its wider campaign against technology-related fraud and suspicious financial flows
• Cambodia stopped renewing online gambling licences in 2019, but residual and illegal operations have continued from some casino premises
• It lands days after the regulator began drafting a suitability test for casino licence renewals, and a year into a crackdown that has removed or suspended 49 licences

A Suspension With No End Date, and a Condition Attached

Cambodia will suspend all casino-based live online betting from October, according to a directive from Prime Minister Hun Manet reported by Asia Gaming Brief. The order applies nationwide to operations run from casino premises, and casinos that breach it risk losing their licences.

The suspension is open-ended rather than fixed. Authorities have said they will use the period to develop stronger legal, regulatory and digital controls, and that operations will be allowed to resume only once those safeguards are in place. The government has presented the decision as part of its intensifying campaign against technology-related fraud and the suspicious financial flows that accompany it.

The legal position it corrects is an old one. Cambodia stopped renewing online gambling licences in 2019, closing the sector to new entrants. In practice, illegal or residual operations have continued to run from inside some licensed casino properties, which is precisely the gap this order addresses: not the licence, but the premises.

That pattern matches what enforcement has found. Cambodian authorities investigated 195 licensed casinos between July 2025 and 31 July 2026, revoking 20 licences and suspending 29 over links to online scam activity, with a further 23 licences expiring. Across the wider campaign against online scam operations, 751 locations were investigated and 605 shut down. The properties named so far, including Casino Ying Huang in Sihanoukville and Shang Hai Resort in Svay Rieng, were penalised for what was happening on their premises rather than for how they were licensed.

The order also sits alongside institutional work at the Commercial Gambling Management Commission of Cambodia, the CGMC, which is drafting a casino integrity and quality evaluation framework to set minimum suitability conditions for licence renewals, and which has been implementing the government's Order No. 01 of 14 July 2025 on the campaign against online scams through a dedicated working group.

Suspending an Activity Is Easier Than Licensing It, and That Is the Point

A blanket suspension needs no criteria, no assessment and no appeal process. It converts a supervision problem into a bright line: any live online betting run from a casino floor is now a licence risk, whoever is running it and whatever arrangement the property has with them. For a regulator with a large estate of border-town properties and limited inspection capacity, that is a far cheaper instrument than trying to distinguish tolerated activity from illegal activity property by property. The cost is borne by any operator running a compliant live studio, and there is no public indication of how many of those exist.

The Condition on Resumption Is the Part Worth Watching

Authorities have tied the end of the suspension to the completion of stronger legal, regulatory and digital controls, which means the industry's return date depends on a government work programme rather than a calendar. Cambodia has been building that programme in public: 21 of 24 institutional outputs for 2026, covering regulatory instruments, standard operating procedures, IT systems and on-site inspection, delivered through eight working groups. If the suspension is genuinely conditional, the sensible read is that live online betting from casino premises does not return until the licensing framework can supervise it, which is unlikely to be this year.

Two Announcements in Four Days Is a Sequence, Not a Coincidence

The suitability framework and the suspension answer the same problem from opposite ends. One decides who is fit to hold a licence; the other removes the activity that has repeatedly proved impossible to police inside licensed premises. Read together they suggest a regulator that has concluded its enforcement problem is structural rather than a matter of bad actors, and Cambodia's standing in the region depends on that reading being correct. The measure of it will be whether the next revocation is for a scam operation found on a casino floor, or for failing a published test before it got there.

Cambodia has spent a year taking licences away. The harder work, now under way, is deciding what a licence is supposed to guarantee in the first place.