Can your bank refund casino deposits? FOS decisions

Visa's own consumer page says it plainly: "Chargebacks are not a legal right." A chargeback is a process inside the card scheme that your bank may use to challenge a payment, and the Financial Ombudsman's job, when a customer complains, is to decide whether the bank acted fairly in using it or not. Two of the decisions we read show how far apart the outcomes can be. NatWest was told to refund £3,916.96 plus interest, 70% of the payments a customer had made to an online casino that then refused to pay out his jackpot. Santander, in a case about two casinos and a customer who had self-excluded, was told to pay £350 for distress and inconvenience but to refund nothing of what was gambled. In both cases the payments had gone through without the gambling merchant code. What differed was the card scheme: the NatWest case ran under Visa, whose rules allowed a claim for the wrong code, and the Santander case under Mastercard, where the ombudsman found no chargeback right for deposits used to stake bets.

Nine decisions, side by side

The ombudsman publishes its final decisions as PDFs. They do not print the date they were issued, only the date by which the customer had to accept or reject them, so that is the date given here. The quotes in this section come from the decisions themselves.

When the ombudsman told a bank to pay

• The payments were coded as something other than gambling. In both Visa cases that succeeded, the casino had taken money through merchants that did not use the gambling code. That broke the scheme's coding rules and allowed a claim under Visa's dispute condition for invalid data; in the NatWest decision the ombudsman added that "there is nothing in the rules restricting such a claim being raised against a merchant providing gambling services". The claim exists because the merchant misdescribed itself, not as a way to recover losses; the bank still decides whether to raise it, and the decisions give a limit of 75 days from the transaction.
• The merchant kept money it should have returned. In the NatWest case under Mastercard, two gambling merchants did not give back money the customer had deposited. The decision quotes Mastercard's rule that chargebacks are available "for transactions in which value or assets are purchased for gambling, investment, or similar purposes and they are not provided according to the contractual terms and conditions agreed to between the cardholder and the merchant", and found that an intrinsic term of the contract was that she could withdraw what she had deposited.
• The bank handled it badly. Where the refund failed, the ombudsman still awarded compensation, for distress and inconvenience or for missed signs of harm: £350 from Santander, £300 from PayPal.

None of these is a route to winnings. In the NatWest Mastercard case the ombudsman agreed the rule "doesn't give a customer chargeback rights to reclaim winnings", and in the Revolut case, where a customer who had paid about £20,000 to a gambling merchant said it refused his full payout by pointing to restrictions it had not disclosed before, the decision records that "Visa has confirmed to this Service that there are no chargeback rights for any sort of gambling transactions, such as the ones Mr P made."

Where claims failed, and why

The plainest answer is in the Santander decision: "the scheme does not provide a chargeback right for funds which have been deposited and then used to stake bets." The customer had self-excluded, and the ombudsman found that the rule "does not make an exception for those who have requested to be self-excluded". Losing money at a casino that took your bets and paid out as agreed is not, under the card schemes as the decisions describe them, a reason to reverse the payment.

Nor is the casino's licence on its own. A Revolut customer argued that the overseas casino he had used was not licensed in the UK, and the ombudsman replied: "I'm not aware of any chargeback condition relating to the license of the gambling operator that would have helped Mr F reclaim his money." The same applies to every site without a British licence, including those described on our no-KYC casinos page: playing there means doing without the protections of the British system, and a missing licence does not by itself bring a card refund. Telling a bank that payments you made yourself were unauthorised is not a refund route either, because the ombudsman weighs the evidence. In the Santander case from 2021 it concluded "it's more likely than not that Miss M made the disputed transactions and that she authorised them", and found that a chargeback, which had not been raised in time, "would've failed anyway".

Crypto deposits have even less to fall back on. None of the nine decisions involved one, and a chargeback is a card process, so coins sent from a wallet sit outside it entirely; how those deposits work is explained on our crypto casinos page.

Gambling blocks and the merchant code

The four-digit merchant category code runs through several of these decisions. It is what a bank's gambling block looks for, and it is why the Chase customer lost: the block "is dependent on the gambling merchant using the correct MCC to identify itself", and in that Mastercard case the ombudsman added that "there are no chargeback codes applicable where incorrect MCC's have been used by the merchant". Under Visa, the same miscoding opened the invalid-data claim in the NatWest and Zopa cases; under Mastercard, in the Chase case, it did not. A gambling block is still worth having: it stops the payments that are coded correctly, and your bank can tell you how to switch it on.

The other payment routes narrow the field further. Credit cards have been banned for gambling with Gambling Commission licensees since 14 April 2020, including payments made by credit card through a money service business, and the Commission says a licensee taking an e-wallet payment should make sure the money "was not loaded from a credit card". PayPal told the ombudsman that gambling transactions were not eligible for a refund under its user agreement.

If you are reading about chargebacks because gambling has started to cost more than you can afford, the National Gambling Helpline is free and open 24 hours a day on 0808 8020 133. The PayPal decision is a reminder that the firms moving your money also have a duty here: the ombudsman wrote that PayPal "has a responsibility to react if there are clear signs that its customers are vulnerable".

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18+ only. General information, not legal or financial advice. The ombudsman decisions cited were read on 27 Oct 2026; each turns on its own facts, and card scheme rules can change. Free, confidential support: National Gambling Helpline 0808 8020 133, 24 hours a day.