A $2 deposit to an Australian online casino: what’s real, what’s blocked, and what it costs

The number $2 looks like an entry point. It isn’t one — not in Australia. No state or territory issues a licence for online casino games or online pokies, so anywhere accepting an Australian deposit for them is an offshore site of the kind the ACMA has been warning about, blocking, and naming in formal correspondence for years. The deposit minimum is the smallest fact on a marketing page, and it is the wrong fact to read first. The right fact is the one the regulator keeps publishing: the games are prohibited under the Interactive Gambling Act 2001, the providers carry no Australian licence, and the consumer protection that comes with a locally licensed account is not on offer.

A reader comparing options needs that on the page before the operator names, the bonus terms, or the payment methods. The rest of this article works through it in the order a person actually decides: what the law says, where to get help if play stops being fun, how a $2 bank transfer moves in Australia when it moves at all, the offshore brands the ACMA has publicly acted against, and the wider frame — what a $2 figure is doing on these pages, and what the legal, land-based alternative looks like.

Data current as of 2 November 2026 against the ACMA register of formal warnings and blocking actions, the Interactive Gambling Act 2001 as amended in 2023 and the further 2026 reforms, the Northern Territory Racing and Wagering Commission’s published operator list, and Australian Payments Plus material on PayID, Osko and BPAY.

Legality and regulation: why no $2 deposit reaches a licensed site

Australia’s online gambling regime treats casino games and online pokies as a prohibited interactive gambling service. The Interactive Gambling Act 2001, strengthened by the 2017 amendments and tightened again in 2023, makes it an offence for a provider to offer those products to anyone in Australia. Wagering on races and sport placed before the event, lotteries and keno are licensable — and in practice almost all online bookmakers are licensed in the Northern Territory for tax reasons, 52 of them sitting under the Northern Territory Racing and Wagering Commission, a body with no full-time staff that meets once a month in Darwin. That is the licensable part of the market. Casino games are not.

Minimum age is 18 across the country. The IGA targets the provider, not the individual player — Australians are not prosecuted for depositing — but an offshore site is also outside the Australian consumer-protection perimeter, so a refused withdrawal has no complaints body behind it, and a balance can sit stranded if the site is blocked before it is cashed out. That asymmetry is the central thing to weigh before any minimum-deposit figure.

Enforcement has a name and a running tally. The ACMA investigates, issues formal warnings, and directs Australian internet service providers to block illegal sites. By the ACMA’s own reporting in June 2026, a cumulative 1,751 illegal gambling and affiliate marketing websites had been blocked since the first blocking request in November 2019, and more than 230 unlicensed services had left the Australian market since 2017. In the round reported on 26 June 2026 alone, twelve more sites were referred for blocking — 7Signs, ChromaBet, Donbet, Duospin, Freshbet, Slots Gem, Jacks Club, Lucky Start, Pointsbetz.com, Spinrise, Vinyl Casino and Wildsino — joining an already long list. None of those names appears here because they are recommended. They appear because they are the running public record of what the regulator has been doing.

A separate reform just landed. The Interactive Gambling Amendment (Gambling Reform) Bill 2026 passed Parliament on 19 August 2026; its advertising and inducement measures commence 1 January 2027 — law with a start date, not yet in force on a page read in 2026.

What the ACMA has named, by date and operator

The regulator publishes formal warnings in batches, and they are the only sustained public ledger of which offshore operators have been told to stop offering to Australians. Reading them is the closest a person outside the regulator gets to an answer of who is actually subject to Australian enforcement.

Two things sit behind this table that are worth saying once. First, a formal warning is a regulator-published step under the IGA, not a criminal charge — but it is the ACMA’s own public record that the named operator was offering a prohibited service to Australians. Second, an offshore site carrying a Curaçao, Kahnawake or Anjouan sub-licence is licensed somewhere, just not in Australia, and that “somewhere” is not the regulator a reader in Australia can complain to. The list above is not exhaustive; it is what research captured, and the ACMA’s register continues to grow.

Settleme

A blocked site does not refund balances by itself. The mechanism is administrative: the ACMA writes to Australian ISPs, the ISPs comply, and the page goes dark for customers on Australian networks. That is the end of the marketing funnel and, in practice, often the end of the conversation about a withdrawal. A reader weighing a $2 minimum should read the ACMA warnings list as the most reliable picture they will get of which offshore operators are still under Australian notice this year, and treat a deposit made to any of them as one made to a business the local regulator has already publicly named.

What the blocking rate looks like over seven years

A blocking rate, in this context, is the ACMA’s published pace of website removals from the Australian internet since the first formal blocking request in November 2019. Against the figures the ACMA reported in June 2026, 1,751 illegal gambling and affiliate marketing websites had been referred for blocking across roughly six and a half years. Divided across the period, that lands at a sustained pace well above one hundred and fifty sites a year on average — and the most recent rounds have moved faster than the early ones. The headline reading of the arithmetic is that the regulator is not catching up; it is keeping up. The picture a person should hold is not “the ACMA is winning” and not “the offshore market is winning”, but a steady attrition in which a brand that advertises today can be blocked within the same quarter. The same arithmetic says why a $2 minimum is a fragile entry point: any balance sitting on a site the ACMA has just referred for blocking is a balance the reader cannot reach.

The four-party-versus-three-party point that decides what a card surcharge looks like

A reader expecting a $2 card deposit needs to know the network the card runs on. Visa, Mastercard and eftpos sit inside a four-party model — the issuer, the acquirer, the network and the merchant — and the Reserve Bank’s July 2025 review proposes removing surcharges on transactions over those three rails. American Express runs as a three-party scheme: it issues the card, processes the transaction, and contracts with merchants directly. The RBA’s proposed surcharge ban explicitly leaves Amex outside its scope. The practical reading is simple. A small deposit routed through Visa, Mastercard or eftpos is on a rail the regulator is moving to make cheaper; a small deposit routed through Amex carries whatever the merchant’s own surcharge structure says it carries, with no public pressure to drop it. That difference is invisible on a casino’s deposit page and meaningful on the receipt.

The credit-card ban that constrains the wallet, not just the card

Since the 2023 amendments to the IGA, Australian-licensed online wagering services cannot accept payment by credit card or by any credit-related product. The restriction was extended in practice to digital wallets such as Apple Pay when those wallets are funding a credit account — a payment by Apple Pay from a debit card is unaffected, a payment from a credit card is. Any offshore casino asking an Australian for a credit card or a crypto deposit is operating outside the Australian rules; the request itself is a tell. Licensed wagering’s legal deposit routes today are debit card, bank transfer, PayID/Osko and BPAY.

Responsible gaming: help that exists, and what is and is not bound to it

If play ever tips from a $2 experiment into something that stops being a choice, free confidential help is one phone call or one chat away. Gambling Help Online runs 24/7, and the National Gambling Helpline — 1800 858 858 — is free from anywhere in Australia. The National Self-Exclusion Register, BetStop, has been live since August 2023; what it binds is Australian-licensed online and phone wagering services. An offshore casino is not connected to BetStop, so a self-exclusion registered there has no effect on a $2 deposit to a site the ACMA has just warned. The reader-side reading is simple: the protections exist, the protections have a perimeter, and the offshore market sits outside it.

A bank-level block is a second layer that operates on the player’s side of the transaction. Westpac’s gambling block works at card level: it refuses authorisation of transactions registered under the merchant category code “Betting/Casino Gambling” on eligible personal credit and debit cards. ANZ’s block, set up inside the ANZ app, blocks gambling transactions on an eligible card and also when that card is used through a digital wallet such as Apple Pay — the block applies to the funding instrument, not just the plastic. Commonwealth Bank lets customers apply a gambling lock to eligible cards through the CommBank app, which automatically blocks most gambling transactions, with the same caveat the other banks print: not every gambling transaction is guaranteed to be stopped, and a small number of non-gambling transactions may be blocked in error. Three different banks, three different apps, the same mechanism — refuse the authorisation on the merchant code — and the same honest caveat about how complete that refusal is.

Two things follow. A bank block is the most reliable everyday control an Australian player has against an unauthorised deposit, because it works at the network layer rather than at the casino’s front door. And a bank block is not the same as a self-exclusion: it stops transactions at the issuing bank, while BetStop binds the licensed operator to refuse the customer. The two are complementary, and neither reaches an offshore site that simply uses a different merchant code or routes through a non-bank processor.

What happens if a bank block is switched off

ANZ states that once the gambling block is on, removing it requires a 48-hour waiting period — a deliberate cooling-off window — and warns, in the same disclosure, that not every gambling transaction will be blocked and that some non-gambling transactions may be blocked in error. The 48-hour window is the kind of design choice that exists because a request made in the moment is not always a request a person wants to honour tomorrow; it is also the kind of design choice that an offshore site, with no equivalent obligation, is not required to offer. A reader who has just turned the block off is a reader who, 48 hours later, can still choose differently.

Payments and payout speed: how a $2 moves in Australia when it moves at all

Australia’s retail payments system is one of the few in the world where a $2 transfer between two bank accounts can clear in under a minute, around the clock, on a weekend, without a fee. That is the New Payments Platform, publicly accessible since 13 February 2018 and operated by Australian Payments Plus, a non-profit whose 13 shareholders include the Reserve Bank of Australia and the major banks. Over 25 million PayID identifiers were registered on the platform by April 2025; participants are required to keep monthly outages under two minutes. The platform’s instant-transfer service is Osko, available through more than 100 Australian financial institutions and addressable by BSB and account number or by PayID.

PayID adds a name check before the transfer goes out. PayID-based transfers show the name of the account holder, and AP+ warns on its own site that being asked to transfer money to a PayID on an illegal gambling site almost certainly means a scam site — the regulator and the payments operator saying, in effect, the same thing in different words. For a $2 sent to a legitimate Australian payee, the payment infrastructure works as designed: the money lands, the receipt is on the statement, and the transaction is finished. For a $2 sent to an offshore casino, the same rail is being asked to carry a payment that the receiving operator has been formally warned is illegal to solicit — and the rail does not know that, because it sees a PayID, a name and a number, not the regulatory history of the merchant.

BPAY sits alongside Osko as the second bill-payment rail almost every Australian bank supports. It has operated since 18 November 1997, is available in the online banking of more than 140 banks and financial institutions, and is offered by over 95,000 businesses — the payer enters the Biller Code and the Customer Reference Number printed on the bill, and the bill is paid from the payer’s account. BPAY is owned equally, through Cardlink Services Limited, by ANZ, Commonwealth Bank, NAB and Westpac. It is not a deposit rail for offshore casinos because offshore casinos do not present BPAY biller codes; but for any licensed wagering service that does, the same rails carry a $2 in the same minute. The threshold-transaction-report rule AUSTRAC applies is for physical cash transfers of A$10,000 or more; ordinary electronic transfers are not subject to per-transaction reporting, regardless of the amount.

Digital wallets sit on top of these rails. By the end of 2025, Apple Pay, Google Pay and Samsung Pay together accounted for around 45 per cent of all card payments in Australia by number. Apple states it does not charge consumer fees for using Apple Pay in stores, online or in apps; any surcharge on a wallet transaction comes from the merchant’s own card-processing fees. Apple also states that transaction limits and PIN requirements for Apple Pay purchases are set by the card issuer or merchant, not by Apple itself. The honest reading is that the wallet is a thin layer; the underlying card decides what surcharges, blocks and credit rules apply. A debit card through Apple Pay behaves like a debit card; a credit card through Apple Pay carries the credit-card ban.

Fundamenta

The fundamentals on which the offshore $2 pitch lands are the same fundamentals that make a $2 transfer between two Australians almost free and almost instant. That coincidence is what gives the marketing its surface plausibility — a small number, a fast rail, a familiar wallet — and what makes the underlying question the only one that matters: which merchant is on the other side of the rail, and which regulator has jurisdiction over it. A $2 Osko payment to a friend’s dinner is one of the cheapest things in Australian banking; a $2 Osko payment to an offshore casino is one of the most expensive things in Australian gambling, because it is the small end of a stream that the regulator has been trying to cut off for six and a half years.

What settlement speed does not change

A fast rail settles the payment; it does not settle the consumer-protection question. The reader should hold those two apart. PayID, Osko and Apple Pay make the deposit simple. They do not make the operator licensed, the bonus fair, the wagering requirement achievable, or the withdrawal reachable once the ACMA has referred the site for blocking. Reading the payments section as the marketing does — fast rails, low minimums, big libraries — is the exact reading the regulator’s formal-warning list is built to interrupt.

Prohibiti

A prohibited interactive gambling service under the Interactive Gambling Act 2001 is the technical term for what every offshore casino offering online pokies or online casino games to Australians is providing. The word “prohibited” is doing real work: it is not a regulatory inconvenience, it is the law’s classification. The prohibition sits upstream of deposit minimums, payment rails, wagering requirements and bonus terms. An Australian player who reads the ACMA’s register, sees the date of the most recent batch of formal warnings, and matches that date to a brand they have an account with, is reading the law’s own ledger of who it has acted against this quarter.

The eleven offshore brands the ACMA has acted against

The brands below are not a ranking. They are the ACMA’s own published record of operators formally warned under the Interactive Gambling Act 2001 for offering prohibited services to Australians. None of them is licensed in Australia; what they carry is a Curaçao or other overseas sub-licence that has no jurisdiction over Australian consumer protection. The “for whom” question is answered for each brand at the end of its block, not as a recommendation but as the page’s own reading of what a $2 deposit to that operator would and would not give a person who already understands the offshore status.

RocketPlay

RocketPlay carries a formal warning from the ACMA, which named Pulsup Ltd as the operator behind Rocketplay.com.au in March 2026. An earlier warning against the brand’s earlier operator, Dama N.V., was issued in May 2022. The site lists itself through Gambling Insider as an offshore casino; the ACMA warning says the site is offering prohibited services to Australians. For a reader weighing a $2 deposit here, the calculation is the one the regulator has already done on the page: the operator has been publicly named twice within four years, and the second naming is the most recent. A $2 deposit to RocketPlay is a deposit to a brand the ACMA has twice refused to leave alone, and the read for a person who wants a deposit the regulator is comfortable with is that this is not that deposit.

Level Up Casino

Level Up Casino was named in the ACMA’s May 2022 warning to Dama N.V., which covered six brands — Bambet, Dazard, Level Up, Rocketplay, Wild Tornado and Cobra Casinos. The brand’s offshore status is the same as RocketPlay’s earlier Dama N.V. profile; what is different is the age of the public warning. Four years on, the operator’s website can still be reached; the warning is on the ACMA’s register. A reader using the Westpac gambling block would see a card-level decline on a Level Up deposit attempt on the merchant code the bank is configured to refuse — the bank-layer control doing the job the regulator cannot, one authorisation at a time.

Woo Casino

In March 2025, the ACMA published a formal warning naming Dama N.V. as the operator of Woo Casino. The brand sits in the same Dama N.V. group as Level Up Casino and RocketPlay’s earlier profile. For a reader who treats the ACMA’s warnings list as a standing reminder, the Woo Casino warning sits in a familiar cluster — same operator, different brand — and the same bank block applies at the card. The research carries no further details on Woo Casino’s current payment or licensing status beyond the ACMA’s own publication, and that is the level of detail a reader should treat as the floor of the picture.

Spirit Casino

Spirit Casino was named in the ACMA’s May 2025 warning to Dama N.V., four months after the Woo Casino warning to the same operator. The pattern is the one the Dama N.V. cluster has been setting since 2022: a single corporate vehicle, multiple brand skins, the ACMA naming each in turn. For a reader, the practical consequence is that a deposit to any of the Dama N.V. brands is a deposit to an operator the regulator has decided to act against repeatedly; the brand’s name is not the operative fact, the operator behind it is.

National Casino

National Casino was named in the ACMA’s July 2025 warning to Consolutetish S.R.L., the same batch as Bizzo Casino. National Casino appears in the listings carried by the ACMA, AUSTRAC and BetStop’s own materials — three of the public-facing Australian registers. The read for a person who treats those three registers as the closest thing to a current Australian blacklist is that National Casino shows up in all three, which is unusual even within a market where most offshore brands show up in one. A $2 deposit here is a deposit to a brand the Australian regulatory perimeter has looked at three times in three different registers.

Bizzo Casino

Bizzo Casino was named in the ACMA’s July 2025 warning to Consolutetish S.R.L. alongside National Casino, and had already been the subject of a 2022 formal warning to TechSolutions (CY) Group Limited and TechSolutions Group N.V. That is two formal warnings across two operators in four years. The brand lists itself through Gamblinginsider.com as an offshore casino, and the regulator’s two warnings across two corporate vehicles describe a brand that has been moved between operators as well as warned. A $2 deposit here sits on top of a longer paper trail than most of the other entries on this list.

Ignition Casino

Ignition Casino was named in the ACMA’s July 2025 warning to Bamboo Media, the same batch that included National Casino and Bizzo Casino. The research carries no further details on Ignition Casino’s current status beyond the ACMA’s own publication; that is again the floor of the picture, and it is also enough to put the brand inside the regulator’s most recent batch.

Instant Casino

Instant Casino is another site cited by the ACMA, which named EOD Code SRL in February 2025. The brand lists itself through EcoPayz and PayID — two of the rails a $2 deposit would in principle use, and a useful tell. A site asking an Australian to deposit via PayID to a name the platform does not recognise as an Australian-licensed wagering operator is, in AP+’s own words, almost certainly a scam site; a brand advertising PayID deposits on its own landing pages is advertising a rail it cannot legitimately use for the product it is selling.

Jackbit

Jackbit was named in the ACMA’s April 2026 warning to Ryker B.V. alongside CasinOK — the most recent warning on the list at the time of writing. For a reader tracking the ACMA’s pace, that is the freshest data point: a brand warned in the same quarter the ACMA’s 12-site blocking round was reported.

Casino Intense

Casino Intense was the subject of an ACMA warning naming Sterplay Holding Ltd in April 2025. The brand lists itself through austrac.gov.au, betstop.gov.au and Gambling Insider — three Australian-facing registers, the same combination as National Casino. The pattern is the same: a brand that the Australian regulatory perimeter has touched in three places.

Sky Crown

Sky Crown was warned by the regulator in September 2022 alongside Blue Leo, with Hollycorn N.V. named as the operator. That is the oldest warning on the list, and the read for a reader comparing dates is straightforward: a four-year-old ACMA warning is not the same as this quarter’s. A brand warned in 2022 may have changed operators, may have changed payment rails, may have changed everything except the brand name. The ACMA’s record is what it is, and it does not, on its own, say whether the same operator is still behind the same skin.

The wider frame

The list above is the research’s set, not the ACMA’s full register. The 12-site blocking round reported on 26 June 2026 — 7Signs, ChromaBet, Donbet, Duospin, Freshbet, Slots Gem, Jacks Club, Lucky Start, Pointsbetz.com, Spinrise, Vinyl Casino and Wildsino — is the regulator’s most recent published batch of blocking actions and is named here as context, not as a recommendation. The H2 Gambling Capital 2025 estimate puts Australians’ losses to illegal gambling sites at around A$3.9 billion a year, with the share of gambling going through legal channels falling from 74 per cent in 2021 to 64 per cent — a four-year slide in the legal channel’s share that is the single most important context number for any discussion of an offshore $2 deposit. The legal channels are not winning share; the offshore market is.

A reader weighing the eleven brands on this list against that headline number is weighing eleven specific points against a market-level trend. Both readings are true. The brand-level data says each of these eleven operators has been publicly named by the regulator; the market-level data says the regulator’s work is part of a longer-running shift in where Australian gambling spend is going. Neither reading recommends a $2 deposit to any of them. Both readings say that the deposit the reader is considering is the kind of deposit the regulator has been warning about, in growing numbers, for six and a half years.

What a $2 minimum is doing on these pages

The honest answer to why an offshore casino page advertises a $2 minimum is that the number is doing marketing work, not payment work. A $2 entry point lowers the cognitive cost of trying the site; it is the smallest plausible number that still looks like a deposit. The casino does not need to make a profit on the $2 itself; it needs the $2 to clear, after which the platform can rely on the same mechanics the wider offshore market relies on — bonus terms, wagering requirements, withdrawal friction — to convert the deposit into something more expensive than the $2 looked.

That mechanism sits underneath a real payments question. PayID and Osko will, in fact, carry a $2 transfer between Australian bank accounts in under a minute, including on weekends. Apple Pay, Google Pay and Samsung Pay together handled 45 per cent of Australian card payments by number at the end of 2025. The retail-payments infrastructure works as advertised. The question is not whether the $2 can move; it is whether the merchant on the other end of the rail is one the regulator has any reach over, and the answer for every offshore casino in this market is no — they are outside the perimeter of the IGA, outside BetStop, outside AUSTRAC’s licensed-wagering reporting, and outside every Australian consumer-protection body that would otherwise step in if a withdrawal was refused.

The legal, land-based alternative sits within the perimeter. Australia’s pub, club and casino pokies are licensed at state and territory level, with the regulatory framework sitting behind the Australian Hotels Association and the state gaming regulators — for New South Wales, Liquor & Gaming NSW; for Victoria, the Victorian Commission for Gambling and Liquor Regulation; for Queensland, the Office of Liquor and Gaming Regulation; and so on across the states and territories. The minimum stake on a pub pokie is set by the venue and the game, not by an offshore website, and the consumer-protection body sits in the state the player is standing in. A reader who wants to play pokies for small stakes has a legal, regulated, in-person option; the $2 minimum online is a different proposition, sold as if it were the same thing.

Closing the comparison

The fairest comparison between the eleven offshore brands above is not a comparison at all. It is a comparison between one Australian-licensed option that does not exist for online casino games and a set of offshore brands the ACMA has publicly warned, with the warnings ranging from September 2022 to April 2026. The data the reader has on each brand is what the ACMA has published: an operator name, a date, a brand. The data the reader does not have is whether the brand is licensed in Australia — none of them is — whether the consumer protection is Australian — none of it is — and whether the balance will be reachable if the ACMA refers the site for blocking next quarter — it may not be.

The recurring thread across all eleven blocks is that the ACMA’s warnings are the page’s only reliable public data on each of these brands, and that the same warnings sit underneath a market-level trend the regulator has not reversed. A $2 deposit is the smallest possible commitment to that trend, and the comparison’s honest conclusion is that the smallest commitment is still a commitment to a market the regulator has been publicly working against since November 2019. The legal alternative is in person, at a licensed venue, on a machine that operates under state regulation — not on a $2 minimum page, and not in a jurisdiction the ACMA can reach.

What this article does not do

This page does not recommend any of the eleven operators above. It does not publish bonus terms, wagering requirements or promotional codes, because the only sources for those terms are affiliate marketing pages, and the ACMA’s own publication is the more reliable data. It does not point to a place where a $2 deposit would reach an Australian-licensed account, because no such place exists. The article describes what an offshore $2 minimum actually is in the Australian market in 2026, what the regulator has done about it, what a $2 transfer looks like when it moves at all, and where to get help if play stops being a choice. The deposit itself is the reader’s call, made on the data the regulator and the banks have published.

Frequently asked questions

Can I actually deposit $2 at a licensed Australian online casino?

No. Online casino games and online pokies cannot be licensed anywhere in Australia under the Interactive Gambling Act 2001. A site advertising a $2 minimum to Australian players is an offshore operator, not an Australian-licensed one, and the ACMA has been publicly warning and blocking offshore casino brands since November 2019.

Why do so many sites advertise a $2 minimum deposit for Australian players?

The $2 figure lowers the cost of trying the site; it is marketing, not the deposit the casino expects to make money on. Australia’s instant-payment rails — PayID, Osko and Apple Pay — make a $2 transfer technically possible, which is what gives the marketing its plausibility, even though the merchant on the other end is outside Australian regulatory reach.

How would a $2 bank transfer normally clear if it were sent through Osko?

Osko transfers between participating Australian banks arrive in under a minute, 24/7 including weekends, whether addressed to a BSB and account number or to a PayID. A PayID transfer shows the name of the account holder before the transfer is sent, and AP+ warns that being asked to transfer to a PayID on an illegal gambling site almost certainly means a scam site.

Is a $2 deposit at an offshore casino covered by any Australian consumer protection?

No. An offshore casino sits outside the Interactive Gambling Act 2001, outside BetStop’s National Self-Exclusion Register, outside AUSTRAC’s licensed-wagering reporting, and outside any Australian complaints body. The bank-level gambling block at Westpac, ANZ or Commonwealth Bank is the only Australian-layer control that operates against a deposit attempt, and it works at card authorisation rather than at the merchant’s discretion.

What is the legal, land-based alternative to a $2 deposit online casino in Australia?

Pub, club and casino pokies are licensed at state and territory level — by Liquor & Gaming NSW, the Victorian Commission for Gambling and Liquor Regulation, the Office of Liquor and Gaming Regulation and equivalent bodies across the country. The minimum stake is set by the venue and the game, and the consumer-protection framework sits in the state the player is standing in. That is the legal, regulated alternative; the $2 minimum online is a different proposition, sold as if it were the same thing.

Is it the deposit amount or the game itself that Australian law actually bans here?

The game. The Interactive Gambling Act 2001 makes it an offence to provide online casino games or online pokies to a person in Australia. The deposit amount is irrelevant to the prohibition — $2 is as prohibited as $200, because the prohibition sits on the product, not the price. Wagering on races and sport placed before the event, lotteries and keno are licensable, and those products sit under a different part of the regime.