Safer Play & Age Verification

South African licensed operators are required to give players the tools to control their own spend. On heldly you can set a daily, weekly or monthly deposit cap from your wallet settings before you fund an account.

A decrease to a limit takes effect immediately. An increase only takes effect after a 24-hour cooling-off period, and it is never applied automatically — you must confirm the change a second time.

Limits apply across every real-money product on the account: fixed-odds fantasy markets, peer-to-peer side bets and paid league buy-ins. The free-to-play Predictor is unaffected.

Under Regulation 4 of the National Gambling Regulations, operators may not extend credit to a player or accept a deposit that breaches a limit the player has set.

A time-out is a short cooling-off break of 24 hours, 7 days, 30 days or 90 days. During a time-out you can still sign in to view your history, but you cannot deposit, bet or enter paid products.

Self-exclusion is a longer, formal step. In South Africa a self-exclusion order under section 14 of the National Gambling Act 7 of 2004 is registered with the National Gambling Board and applies for a minimum of 12 months, and it cannot be reversed early.

You can also register a self-exclusion directly with the South African Responsible Gambling Foundation, and a family member may apply to a Provincial Licensing Authority to have a person excluded where gambling is causing harm.

Free, confidential counselling is available 24/7 from the National Responsible Gambling Programme on 0800 006 008, or by sending an SMS with the word "help" to 076 675 0710.

It is a criminal offence in South Africa for a person under the age of 18 to gamble, and for any operator to permit it. Section 12 of the National Gambling Act 7 of 2004 prohibits minors from placing a bet, entering a designated gambling area or being targeted by gambling advertising.

No account on heldly may be opened, funded or used by a person under 18. Where an account is found to belong to a minor, it is closed, any winnings are void and stakes are returned to the source of funds.

Adults sharing a device should use parental-control or filtering software to keep gambling content away from children.

Advertising rules also apply: promotions may not appeal primarily to minors, and every real-money page carries an 18+ notice and a responsible-gambling message.

Before your first deposit or withdrawal, heldly verifies your identity. You provide your full name, date of birth, South African ID or passport number and a recent proof of address.

This is a legal obligation, not a formality: the Financial Intelligence Centre Act 38 of 2001 (FICA) requires accountable institutions to establish and verify the identity of every client, and gambling licence conditions require an age check before real-money activity.

Documents are checked against accredited identity-verification sources, stored securely and used only for verification, fraud prevention and regulatory reporting. They are never sold.

If a verification check cannot be completed, the account stays restricted to free-to-play features until valid documents are supplied.