Home / Restricted jurisdictions
Last updated 26 August 2026. Where we do not offer the service, who is covered, how the restriction is enforced, and what happens if it is discovered after purchase.
Not every restriction works the same way, and the difference matters to you. We apply two distinct tests.
| Location | Applies to where you are — your residence and the network address you connect from. This covers the majority of the list below. Your nationality alone does not place you within it. A Russian or Belarusian citizen living and banking in, say, Germany is welcome here. |
|---|---|
| Location and nationality | Applies to a narrower group — countries under comprehensive embargo, where dealing with the jurisdiction carries risk regardless of where the person lives. Here the citizenship on your identity document is also covered. |
We draw this line deliberately rather than banning nationalities across the board. Under UK law nationality is a protected characteristic, and refusing service on nationality alone is direct discrimination; UK sanctions law itself turns on residence and presence, not on the passport a person holds. Restricting more than the law requires would not make us safer — it would expose us, and it would exclude people the rules were never aimed at.
Which countries fall in which group is marked in the tables below.
Location and nationality are both covered here.
| Iran | Comprehensive sanctions · FATF call for action |
|---|---|
| North Korea (DPRK) | Comprehensive sanctions · FATF call for action |
| Myanmar (Burma) | FATF call for action |
| Syria | Comprehensive sanctions |
| Cuba | Comprehensive US sanctions |
A nationality match does not close an account by itself: it raises a compliance review, and a person decides. Dual nationality, long-term residence elsewhere and similar circumstances are exactly the cases a rule cannot settle on its own.
Location only. Nationality is not a restriction here.
| Russian Federation | Extensive UK, EU and US restrictions on financial services and payments |
|---|---|
| Belarus | Extensive UK, EU and US restrictions on financial services and payments |
The measures here are extensive rather than comprehensive, so this is partly our own decision. We would have to assess every application individually and might still be unable to pay a reward at the end of it. We would rather decline clearly at the start than accept a fee and refuse a payout later.
Location only. These are regions, not countries, and they share Ukraine's country code — so a country-level block cannot reach them. We enforce them at region level, and because network data for these territories is unreliable we also match on city and network operator:
| Crimea | UA-43 · Autonomous Republic of Crimea |
|---|---|
| Sevastopol | UA-40 |
| Donetsk | UA-14 · occupied parts |
| Luhansk | UA-09 · occupied parts |
| Zaporizhzhia | UA-23 · occupied parts |
| Kherson | UA-65 · occupied parts |
Ukraine as a whole is not restricted. A participant in Kyiv, Lviv or Odesa is welcome; the restriction is limited to the territories above.
| United States | Including American Samoa, Guam, Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico, US Minor Outlying Islands and the US Virgin Islands. This is a product decision driven by US derivatives regulation, not a sanctions measure. |
|---|---|
| Belgium | The national regulator prohibits the distribution of certain leveraged products to retail clients. |
Separately from the list above, we decline any person who appears on a sanctions list personally, or who is owned or controlled by a listed person, in any country. Names are screened against the UK consolidated list (OFSI) and the US OFAC SDN list, refreshed weekly — see the AML and KYC policy, section 6.
| At sign-up | Country and region are resolved from your network address. A restricted result stops registration before an account exists. |
|---|---|
| At payment | The same check runs again, and the payment method must be in your own name. |
| At verification | Nationality and country of issue are read from the document, not from what you type, and checked against the list. A restricted result raises a compliance alert reviewed by a person. The details you declared are compared with the document, and a mismatch is investigated rather than waved through. Giving false details to get past this gate is a prohibited practice. |
| Before any reward | An open alert of this kind blocks the payment until a person has resolved it. No reward is released while one is open. |
Network-address checks can be evaded with a VPN, and we do not claim otherwise. That is exactly why the identity and payment checks exist behind them: the last gate — before money leaves us — is the one that cannot be routed around.
Location data for the occupied territories is also imperfect in the other direction: commercial IP databases frequently place networks in Donetsk and Luhansk under Russian regions hundreds of kilometres away, and place Crimea under either Ukraine or Russia depending on the operator. We tested this rather than assumed it, and we match on region code, city and network operator together instead of relying on any single field.
If we discover after purchase that you were within a restricted category, we close the account and refund the assessment fee. The restriction is ours to enforce, and you should not be out of pocket for our failure to catch it earlier. No reward is payable in that situation, because paying one may itself be unlawful.
Giving false residence or nationality details to get past these checks is a prohibited practice and ends the assessment without refund.
Where a sanctions match is involved we may be unable to explain the detail, because disclosure can itself be unlawful. The complaints process sets out what we can and cannot say, and how to ask for a human review.
Sanctions regimes and FATF listings change. This page is reviewed whenever a relevant designation changes and at least quarterly; the version in force on the day you buy is the one that applies to your purchase. Inside our systems the list is held in a single place, so the country gate, the identity check and the reward gate always read the same version. The sanctions core of that list cannot be removed from an admin screen — only added to.
Additions take effect immediately for new participants. Where an addition affects an existing participant, we close the account and refund under section 4.