Thai Ex-MP Says Gambling Sites Still Open Despite Blocks
A former Thai lawmaker has questioned whether the government's online gambling crackdown is working, saying that nearly one million blocked URLs have not stopped major betting sites from being reachable in the country. Former Democrat Party MP Sirichok Sopha made the claim in a Facebook post on Sunday, according to the Bangkok Post, which reported it on 26 October 2026.
Sirichok said he tested 30 gambling websites and found that 29 remained accessible from Thailand. The only exception was Shuffle.com, which restricts access from Thailand on its own initiative, he said. He claimed that major platforms including UFABET, 1XBET, bet365, KUBET, Stake.com and SBOBET could still be reached by Thai users, some of which he said have operated for years.
These are the former MP's own test results as reported by the Bangkok Post. The newspaper did not say it had independently checked the sites, and the operators were not quoted in its report.
The Ministry's Block Count
The criticism targets the Ministry of Digital Economy and Society (DES), which said it blocked 945,075 URLs tied to illegal activity in fiscal 2026, the period from October 2025 to September 2026.
In its own breakdown, the ministry said Thai courts ordered 835,207 of those URLs blocked, with a further 109,868 removed through cooperation with digital platforms. Gambling.com covered the figures when the ministry published them, in a report on Thailand blocking 945,075 gambling URLs in FY2026.
Sirichok said he does not understand why the ministry takes pride in blocking such a large number of URLs while major operators are still running openly. He argued that the ministry should seek restrictions through legal procedures and check that they work, rather than repeatedly blocking URLs without making sure the sites are out of reach.
Calls For Different Tools
Sirichok urged the ministry to pursue more effective blocking measures and suggested working with Cloudflare, a website security provider whose geolocation-blocking technology can restrict access by country. Offshore sites are hard to switch off from inside Thailand because the operators are registered and hosted abroad, which is why the ministry has said blocking needs court orders and coordination with internet service providers.
The former MP also raised money-flow questions. He said an unnamed political party was scheduled to pay its MPs an extra monthly allowance of 400,000 baht each and asked where the funds came from. For a party with 100 MPs, he said, that would total 40 million baht a month, or nearly 500 million baht a year.
He also claimed to have received information earlier that someone had offered 40 million baht a month in exchange for letting a gambling website keep operating. The Bangkok Post noted that he suggested a possible link between gambling revenue and the alleged payments to MPs, but provided no evidence of such a connection. Nothing in the report names a party or an individual, and no finding has been made against anyone.
Casino Games Hub
Part Of A Wider Row
The post follows a separate dispute over Shuffle.com, where Sirichok has called for investigations into who ordered the site to stop accepting Thai players.
Gambling.com reported on that in Thailand scrutiny grows over the Shuffle.com block. The ministry has not, in the coverage reviewed here, responded to the claim that 29 of 30 tested sites remain open.
