Legal Consequences of Playing at an Unlicensed Online Casino
What the Player Actually Faces — and Where Realistic Defences Lie
Robert Nogacki • Attorney-at-Law (radca prawny) • Skarbiec Law Firm, Warsaw
The pattern never varies. A Polish-language interface, instant bank transfers, welcome bonuses, and the logo of some foreign regulator in the footer. The player spends weeks on the platform, loses more than he intended, eventually hits a winning streak, and requests a withdrawal. Then either the bank asks about the source of funds, or a letter arrives from the customs and fiscal authority. And at that point, the real game begins—except that the stakes are now set by the legislature, not the house.
Polish law treats participation in unlicensed online gambling with a severity that catches many players off guard. Not because the individual penalties are draconian, but because they are cumulative. The player faces liability simultaneously on two independent tracks—fiscal-criminal and administrative—and the Constitutional Tribunal has expressly confirmed that this does not constitute impermissible double jeopardy. It is, in the Tribunal’s reasoning, two distinct sanctions for two distinct infringements.
What Exactly the Player Faces
For a single act of participation, the player may be subject to a fine under the Fiscal Criminal Code, the forfeiture of funds and winnings found in the gaming device to the State Treasury (Article 30(5) FCC), and an administrative monetary penalty equal to one hundred per cent of gross winnings. Not alternatively. Not in the alternative. All three, simultaneously.
Track One: Fiscal-Criminal Liability
Where the platform is foreign—an operator established outside Poland, conducting its activities under the law of another jurisdiction—the player is liable under Article 107 § 2 of the Fiscal Criminal Code for participating in a foreign game of chance on the territory of the Republic of Poland. The penalty: a fine of up to 120 daily rates. Where the platform operates from within Poland without the requisite concession, Article 109 FCC applies.
Both offences share a characteristic that surprises laypeople: they are formal. Mere participation satisfies the statutory elements—the player need not have won, need not even have deposited funds. It suffices that he played. At the same time, both require intentional commission: the perpetrator must have been at least aware that the platform was operating without the requisite authorisation.
What matters most, however, is what happens after conviction. In the case of a fiscal crime, the court must order the forfeiture of funds and winnings found in the gaming device (Article 30(5) FCC). Not “may”—must. There is no judicial discretion.
But: if the act is classified as a case of lesser gravity (Article 107 § 4 FCC), it becomes a fiscal misdemeanour rather than a crime. And at the misdemeanour level, forfeiture is discretionary, not mandatory (Article 49(2) FCC). The court may order it—but is not obliged to. For a player who won a few thousand zlotys on a single occasion, this classification is often realistic, and it changes the entire complexion of the case.
Track Two: The Administrative Penalty
Independently of whatever transpires on the criminal track, the head of the customs and fiscal office may impose a monetary penalty under Article 89(1)(6) of the Gambling Act. The amount: one hundred per cent of the winnings, calculated gross—that is, without deducting the stakes the player wagered. If the player won 10,000 zlotys but had previously deposited 8,000, the penalty is 10,000, not 2,000.
Combine this with FCC forfeiture and the picture becomes clear: the legislator has deliberately constructed a system in which the player may lose more than he ever won. This is not a drafting error. It is a calibrated deterrent.
It gets worse. Administrative liability is objective—independent of fault. A player may be acquitted on the criminal track and receive the administrative penalty decision on the same day.
The Paradox Nobody Mentions
Winnings from unlicensed casinos are exempt from personal income tax. Article 2(1)(4) of the PIT Act excludes income from acts that cannot form the subject matter of a legally effective contract. A wagering agreement with an unlicensed casino is void ab initio—hence no tax obligation. But the forfeiture remains. And the administrative penalty remains. The player owes no tax, yet may lose everything. And more.
When the Problem Solves Itself: Limitation Periods
Time works in the player’s favour—provided nobody acts first.
On the criminal track, the offence under Article 107 § 2 FCC becomes time-barred five years from the date of commission (Article 44(1)(1) FCC). If, within that period, proceedings are instituted against the suspect—that is, charges are formally presented in personam, as distinct from the mere opening of an investigation in rem—the limitation period is extended by a further five years (Article 44(5) FCC). On the administrative track—likewise five years (Article 189g(1) of the Code of Administrative Procedure), as the Supreme Administrative Court confirmed in its judgment of 28 November 2017 (II GSK 2433/17).
If five years have elapsed, or are about to elapse, from the date of play without the commencement of proceedings, punishability lapses on both tracks simultaneously. This circumstance transforms the cost–benefit calculus of every available action—above all, the filing of a voluntary disclosure. For why disclose a crime that will be time-barred in a matter of months?
Voluntary Disclosure: When It Helps and When It Hurts
Voluntary disclosure (czynny żal) under Article 16 FCC is the single most effective instrument for avoiding fiscal-criminal liability. The perpetrator reports to the competent authority, discloses the circumstances of the offence, and—in principle—submits to the forfeiture of benefits. In return, criminal liability is extinguished entirely.
This sounds like an obvious recommendation. The difficulty is that the voluntary disclosure is a single-track weapon. It operates exclusively on the criminal track. It does not extinguish the administrative penalty under Article 89 of the Gambling Act. And the very act of filing—in which the perpetrator describes in detail what he did, when, and for how much—furnishes the authority with a ready-made evidentiary dossier for initiating administrative proceedings to impose the one-hundred-per-cent penalty.
In other words, the voluntary disclosure shields against the fine but may simultaneously facilitate the imposition of a penalty larger than the fine itself. This does not disqualify it as an instrument—but it means that the decision to file requires strategic calculation, not reflex.
There is one further catch: the voluntary disclosure is ineffective if the authority has already taken any steps vis-à-vis the perpetrator. In an era of automated banking surveillance, the window of opportunity can be narrow.
How to Defend Oneself
Error as to Unlawfulness: “I Did Not Know It Was Illegal”
The casino held an MGA licence, offered a Polish-language interface, accepted Polish bank transfers, and did not appear on the Register of Prohibited Domains maintained by the Ministry of Finance. The player acted in the genuine belief that he was gambling lawfully. Does this protect him?
Potentially, yes. Article 10 § 4 FCC addresses unawareness of the punishability of one’s conduct—the situation in which the perpetrator did not know that his action was criminally sanctioned. If that unawareness was justified by the circumstances, liability is excluded. Article 10 § 3 FCC, in turn, addresses the mistaken belief that a circumstance excluding unlawfulness exists—for instance, the conviction that the platform was operating lawfully on the basis of a foreign licence. Here, too, justified error excludes liability.
The defence, however, may reach even deeper. Professor L. Wilk argues in his commentary on Article 10 FCC that, in fiscal criminal law, unawareness of the provisions of financial law—that is, the regulatory provisions which supplement the blank disposition of the criminal norm and shape the statutory elements of the offence—constitutes error as to a statutory element under Article 10 § 1 FCC, which excludes intentional commission. Critically, such error does not even require justification—its mere occurrence suffices (for a fuller treatment, see L. Wilk, J. Zagrodnik, Kodeks karny skarbowy. Komentarz [Fiscal Criminal Code: Commentary], 5th ed., Warsaw 2021, commentary on Article 10, points 5–6).
Applied to the Gambling Act, this reasoning leads to the conclusion that years of contradictory judicial rulings on the “technical regulation” character of the Gambling Act’s provisions—conflicting Supreme Court decisions on notification obligations to the European Commission—may have engendered in the perpetrator the belief that the provisions in question did not apply, or did not extend to games operated by foreign platforms online. Such a belief, on Wilk’s analysis, qualifies as error as to a statutory element under Article 10 § 1 FCC—and thus excludes intentional commission without any need to demonstrate that the error was justified.
The strength of this argument depends on the facts. It is stronger where the player checked the Ministry of Finance register and verified the licence than where he never gave the matter a thought. But the very availability of this line of defence reshapes the procedural landscape.
The Administrative Penalty: Fixed, but Not Absolute
The penalty under Article 89(1)(6) of the Gambling Act is a fixed-amount penalty—it equals one hundred per cent of the winnings obtained. The authority has no discretion to reduce it to, say, fifty or seventy per cent.
This does not mean, however, that the player is entirely without arguments. If Chapter IVa of the Code of Administrative Procedure applies to monetary penalties under the Gambling Act—a view expressed both in academic commentary and in case law—then Article 189f CAP may come into play, permitting the authority to waive the penalty entirely and issue an admonition instead, provided the gravity of the infringement is negligible and the party has ceased the unlawful conduct. The argumentative space, therefore, lies not in reducing the amount but in the possibility of a complete waiver in cases of minor significance. It must be noted, however, that the very applicability of Chapter IVa CAP to penalties under the Gambling Act remains a matter of doctrinal debate.
The Lesser Gravity Classification: An Underappreciated Tool
Reclassification as a case of lesser gravity does not merely reduce the fine. It changes the category of the offence from a crime to a misdemeanour, bringing with it discretionary forfeiture, shorter limitation periods, and no entry in the National Criminal Register. For a player who gambled a handful of times for modest sums, this classification may mark the difference between losing everything and paying a fine of a few hundred zlotys.
The Risk Players Overlook: Anti-Money-Laundering
The disbursement of funds from a foreign gambling platform to a Polish bank account creates a transaction trail. The bank, as an obligated institution under the Anti-Money-Laundering Act, is required to analyse suspicious transactions. A credit from a payment service provider associated with online gambling may trigger a suspicious activity report to the General Inspector of Financial Information (GIIF).
Such a report may in turn trigger a freezing order on the bank account and the commencement of proceedings—thereby closing the window for voluntary disclosure. The AML track and the fiscal-criminal track are communicating vessels. Anyone contemplating a voluntary disclosure must simultaneously assess whether the bank has already acted.
Instead of a Summary: A Strategic Map
There is no universal prescription. Voluntary disclosure shields against the fine but exposes the player to the administrative authority. Error as to unlawfulness protects against a finding of guilt but affords no shelter from the administrative penalty. Limitation resolves the problem entirely—but only if the authority does not act first.
That is why the point of departure for any strategy is a meticulous establishment of the facts: precisely when the player gambled, how much he won, how the funds flowed, whether the authority has already taken any steps, and how the platform presented itself to the user. Only with these data can one assess which instruments possess genuine value—and which would amount to nothing more than a costly gesture. Effective asset protection demands proactive planning, not post hoc reaction.
One thing is certain: the worst strategy is the absence of strategy. Reflexive action—or, worse still, complete passivity—in a situation where each passing day may be closing windows that, once lost, cannot be reopened.
Robert Nogacki – licensed legal counsel (radca prawny, WA-9026), Founder of Kancelaria Prawna Skarbiec.
There are lawyers who practice law. And there are those who deal with problems for which the law has no ready answer. For over twenty years, Kancelaria Skarbiec has worked at the intersection of tax law, corporate structures, and the deeply human reluctance to give the state more than the state is owed. We advise entrepreneurs from over a dozen countries – from those on the Forbes list to those whose bank account was just seized by the tax authority and who do not know what to do tomorrow morning.
One of the most frequently cited experts on tax law in Polish media – he writes for Rzeczpospolita, Dziennik Gazeta Prawna, and Parkiet not because it looks good on a résumé, but because certain things cannot be explained in a court filing and someone needs to say them out loud. Author of AI Decoding Satoshi Nakamoto: Artificial Intelligence on the Trail of Bitcoin’s Creator. Co-author of the award-winning book Bezpieczeństwo współczesnej firmy (Security of a Modern Company).
Kancelaria Skarbiec holds top positions in the tax law firm rankings of Dziennik Gazeta Prawna. Four-time winner of the European Medal, recipient of the title International Tax Planning Law Firm of the Year in Poland.
He specializes in tax disputes with fiscal authorities, international tax planning, crypto-asset regulation, and asset protection. Since 2006, he has led the WGI case – one of the longest-running criminal proceedings in the history of the Polish financial market – because there are things you do not leave half-done, even if they take two decades. He believes the law is too serious to be treated only seriously – and that the best legal advice is the kind that ensures the client never has to stand before a court.
