Thailand Blocked 945,075 Gambling URLs in Fiscal 2026, Up From 62,213 Two Years Earlier

Thailand's digital ministry says it blocked 945,075 gambling-related URLs in the year to September, most of them found by its own AI-assisted monitoring and blocked under court orders. The count measures how hard the state is pushing; it does not show whether the market has shrunk.

• Thailand's Ministry of Digital Economy and Society (DES) says it blocked 945,075 URLs related to online gambling in fiscal 2026, the year from 1 October 2025 to 30 September 2026
• Court orders covered 835,207 of them, 749,546 found by the ministry's own AI-assisted monitoring and 85,661 referred by the police, while 109,868 were taken down through cooperation with digital platforms
• Ministry figures put gambling blocks at 62,213 URLs in fiscal 2024 and 2,059 in fiscal 2023, although the ministry has since described using AI detection and automated court petitions, so the years may not be strictly comparable
• Minister Chaichanok Chidchob announced the total after meeting anti-gambling and youth groups on 5 October, and the ministry now plans a public reporting channel, a working group with TikTok and Meta, and action through search engines
• The count arrives with no licensed online market in Thailand, the casino bill withdrawn in 2025 and police pursuing online betting cases such as the arrest of the activist Atchariya

The Ministry Says Nine in Ten Court-Ordered Blocks Came From Its Own Detection

Thailand blocked 945,075 gambling-related URLs in fiscal 2026, according to a statement the Ministry of Digital Economy and Society published on 6 October. Of these, 835,207 were blocked under court orders: 749,546 identified through the ministry's own proactive measures, which it says use AI to find gambling websites, and 85,661 from information supplied by the Royal Thai Police. A further 109,868 were removed through cooperation with digital platforms. The statement does not break the total down by platform, does not say how many distinct websites, domains or operators lie behind the URLs, and does not give the year's total for all categories of illegal content.

The figure came after a meeting on 5 October between DES Minister Chaichanok Chidchob and the Stop Gambling Foundation, led by its secretary-general Thanakorn Komkris, together with three youth and family networks. The ministry says it will open a channel for the public, including young people, to report gambling content; set up a working group to analyse the reports, coordinate with platforms such as TikTok and Meta and pass material to the police; work with search engine providers to reduce access to gambling sites through search; and run awareness work with the education and interior ministries. Chaichanok said the problem could not be solved by any single agency and that the public was a key source of tip-offs.

A Year Built Up in Monthly Updates

The count was reported as it grew. Between 1 October 2025 and 11 January 2026, DES blocked 220,486 illegal URLs, 183,977 of them gambling-related, ministry spokesman Wetang Phuangsup said, according to Thai PBS. By 28 February the totals were 437,473 and 362,482, according to a government release carried by the Public Relations Department, and by 31 March 601,594 and 480,081, according to The Bangkok Insight.

For the eight months to 31 May, the ministry reported 673,699 gambling-related blocks, 635,717 by court order and 37,982 through platforms, out of 787,899 across all categories, DES Deputy Minister Nan Boonthida Somchai said, according to Kaohoon. In July the government said 883,012 illegal URLs of all kinds had been blocked between 1 October and 13 July, more than 600,000 of them gambling sites under court orders, and announced a DES notification under the Computer Crime Act that it said cuts the time to block a URL in urgent cases from days to hours, Siam Rath reported.

The police keep their own count. Police Lieutenant General Trairong Phiwphan, a police spokesman, said on 31 May that 717,425 gambling URLs had been blocked across Facebook, LINE and TikTok between 1 October and 20 May, according to Khaosod. He also said demand had not fallen, citing police data that more than 4 million people aged 15 to 25 had become involved in online gambling by early 2026.

A URL Count Measures the Effort, Not the Market

A URL is not a website. One gambling brand can generate thousands of addresses across mirror domains, social posts and short videos, and each one blocked counts once. That is why two agencies can report 717,425 and 673,699 for almost the same period without either being wrong, and why the 15-fold rise from fiscal 2024 says more about Thailand's detection capacity than about the size of its black market. In Brazil too, counts of illegal betting sites diverge depending on who counts. Nearly a million URLs blocked in a year, while police say demand has not fallen, shows the scale of the supply rather than the success of the policy.

The Ministry Now Generates Most of Its Own Targets

Nearly 90% of the court-ordered blocks came from the ministry's own monitoring, not from police referrals. That makes the programme largely automated detection backed by court orders, at about 2,290 URLs a day, through a process the government sped up for urgent cases in July. The ministry has not said how many petitions those orders came from, how often the courts refuse one, or how many blocked URLs reappear under new addresses. If the figures across releases are like for like, the mix has also shifted: court-ordered blocks averaged about 79,000 a month to May and about 50,000 a month after it, while platform takedowns rose from 37,982 in eight months to 109,868 for the year. The plan to involve search engines and the public points the same way, towards cutting off how players find sites, not only where sites are hosted.

Prohibition Leaves Blocking as the Only Lever

Thailand bans most gambling under the Gambling Act of 1935 and has no licensed online channel. The cabinet withdrew the entertainment complex bill in July 2025, and when former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra spoke of making online gambling legal early in 2025, the ministry said only that it was studying the law, Bangkok Biz News reported. Without a legal market there is nowhere to channel demand, so enforcement must carry the whole policy, and a blocked URL can be replaced for the price of a new address. Next door, Cambodia's ban on online gambling by its casinos took effect at the end of September, and its anti-scam commission says 24 casinos have complied. Fiscal 2027 will be the first Thai year measured after that shutdown.

Thailand has built an efficient machine for finding and blocking gambling links, and its own figures show the machine is busier than ever. A count that keeps rising is evidence of the problem's persistence as much as of the state's resolve.