Gambling addiction help in Colombia

Verified helplines

Helplines and online chat

Línea 106 is the national mental-health orientation line, run by the Ministerio de Salud y Protección Social. It is free, confidential and operates 24 hours a day, giving information, initial crisis support and, where needed, referral on to specialist services. WhatsApp is available in several cities.

It is a general mental-health line rather than a gambling service, so say plainly at the start that the problem is gambling and money. Beyond 106, the ministry lists territorial mental-health lines run by departments and cities, which is worth checking if you want something closer to home.

Self-exclusion

Colombia has no central self-exclusion register. Instead, each licensed online operator must provide a self-exclusion function inside its own platform, which blocks bets from any profile created with your identity number. Coljuegos extended the same requirement to online novelty games, including Baloto and SuperAstro.

What that means in practice

1. List the sites where you hold accounts. Coljuegos publishes the list of authorised online operators (there were 14 in 2025), so you can check which of yours are licensed at all.
2. On each one, find self-exclusion in the account or responsible-gambling settings and apply it. The block is keyed to your identity number, so it also stops you opening a fresh profile on that site.
3. Repeat for every operator. Excluding yourself from one does nothing about the others.

Uptake is not marginal: Coljuegos recorded 245,199 self-exclusion requests across 2024 and 2025. Operators' duties here come from Resolución 20244000022654 of 2024, which also requires them to run responsible-gambling programmes with education, monitoring and annual reporting.

Unlicensed sites are outside all of it. For that gap, see blocking apps and self-exclusion by country.

Blocking gambling payments and sites

No Colombian bank publishes a gambling-transaction block that customers can switch on, as of September 2026.

Coljuegos runs a self-assessment instead: the test de identificación de factores de riesgo at tomaelcontrol.coljuegos.gov.co, alongside educational material and directories of mental-health services. It is a screening tool, not a block, but the result is something concrete to bring to Línea 106 or a doctor.

Because operator-level exclusion has to be repeated site by site, device and network blocking is what closes the remaining routes in one move, including the unlicensed sites no Colombian rule reaches.

Free treatment and counselling

The entry point is Línea 106: free, confidential, 24/7, offering initial support and referral to specialist services where the case needs it. The Ministerio de Salud also publishes a directory of territorial mental-health lines, and Coljuegos links to mental-health care directories from its Toma el Control site.

Colombia does not publish a gambling-specific public treatment programme, so what you are asking for is mental-health care that treats the gambling as the primary problem. Be specific on the first call: amounts, frequency, debts, how long it has gone on, because a general mental-health assessment will otherwise record anxiety or depression and stop there. A completed self-assessment or the Coljuegos risk test makes that conversation shorter.

Support for family and friends

Línea 106 takes calls from relatives, not only from the person gambling, and the same free and confidential terms apply.

Family members cannot request self-exclusion on someone else's behalf: the operator-level tools are tied to the account holder's identity document, so the request has to come from them. Where relatives can act is around the money and the devices: shared accounts, cards saved in betting apps, and household finances.

Two starting points: how to help someone with a gambling addiction and what to do about gambling debt.

Gambling law and the regulator

Coljuegos regulates games of luck and chance in Colombia. Online games are licensed under Ley 643 de 2001, whose article 38, as amended by article 93 of Ley 1753 de 2015, defines a game as internet-operated when the bet and the prize payment both happen online after the player registers on an authorised site.

Licences are granted through concession contracts of three to five years. Operators have to certify their platform through a Coljuegos-approved laboratory, keep a main and a backup server inside Colombia for real-time monitoring, and hold anti-money-laundering procedures and a compliance officer.

Offering games of chance to minors is prohibited under Ley 643 de 2001, alongside selling games that disguise their random nature or their risks. Colombia was the first country in Latin America to license online gambling, which is why the self-exclusion tools here, however fragmented, reach further than in most of the region.