ClickandBuy at Online Casinos 2026: Closed Since 30 April 2016

ClickandBuy has been closed for over 9 years. The Deutsche Telekom-owned German e-wallet ceased operations on 30 April 2016, after a phased wind-down that started with top-up restrictions on 5 January 2016. If you have landed on a casino cashier in 2026 that still lists ’’ClickandBuy’’ as a deposit option, the listing is stale and the integration will not work.

This page exists because search demand for ’’ClickandBuy casinos’’ persists 9 years after the closure. Players researching legacy guides written before 2016 land here looking for a deposit walkthrough. The honest answer is to route them to current European alternatives: Skrill, Neteller, Trustly, Sofort (now Klarna Pay Now), Paysafecard, and direct bank transfer.

I never used ClickandBuy myself; the service shut down before I started testing online casino payment rails seriously in 2018. The historical record below comes from verified sources at Deutsche Telekom corporate, the German trade press (heise, teltarif, ZDNet, silicon.de), and post-closure coverage from The Paypers and Paymentwall. The alternative-rail recommendations come from my hands-on testing of the European casino-payment stack since 2018.

I have written this page to act as the canonical 2026 resource for anyone landing on a stale ClickandBuy listing.

Deutsche Telekom announced the closure of the ClickandBuy payment service in late 2015 and executed the wind-down through the first four months of 2016. The official deadline for using existing balances was 30 April 2016. Customers had been unable to add new funds to their ClickandBuy accounts since 5 January 2016.

The Closure Timeline

• Late 2015: Deutsche Telekom announced internally and to customers that ClickandBuy would shut down in the first half of 2016.
• 5 January 2016: Top-ups disabled. Customers could no longer add new funds to their ClickandBuy accounts.
• January-April 2016: Customers were urged to spend existing balances at participating merchants or sweep funds back to their linked bank accounts.
• 30 April 2016: Final deadline. After this date, the service ceased accepting transactions at merchants.
• Post-30 April 2016: Remaining balance withdrawals remained possible for a limited time after the closure, but no new deposits or transactions could be processed.

The CEO Statement

Then-Deutsche-Telekom CEO Timotheus Höttges acknowledged the strategic mistake plainly in his closure communication: ’’From today’’s perspective, one may regard it as a mistake. ClickandBuy is a completely independent solution that we could not standardize.’’

That quote captures the strategic logic. Deutsche Telekom had spent 6 years (2010-2016) trying to integrate ClickandBuy into the broader Telekom ecosystem. The integration never landed, and the standalone payment service could not compete head-on with PayPal, Skrill, and the rising Open Banking rails. The 14 million customers at closure was a meaningful base, but not enough to justify the operating cost against a product that lacked strategic fit.

What Happened to Customers

Most ClickandBuy customers had migrated to PayPal, Skrill, or Sofort in the wind-down period. The 80 affected employees were either redeployed within Deutsche Telekom or supported through severance. Merchants that had integrated ClickandBuy (over 16,000 at peak) replaced it with PayPal, Klarna, Sofort, or country-specific rails through the first half of 2016.

Around 25 casino-payment guides on the public internet still list ClickandBuy as an accepted method in 2026, 9 years after the service closed. This is purely an SEO and content-decay artifact. None of those listings work. The integrations were retired across the casino vertical through mid-to-late 2016, and any cashier UI that still shows a ClickandBuy tile will fail when you try to use it.

Three reasons the legacy listings persist. First, content decay: old casino-review pages written in 2014 or 2015 (with high domain authority) never got updated after the closure. Search engines still surface those pages because the underlying domains remain trusted.

Second, automated content factories: some payment-guide sites scrape older listings and republish them under new dates without verifying current operational status.

Third, residual search demand: players who used ClickandBuy a decade ago still occasionally search for it, which keeps the legacy guides in low-volume but consistent traffic.

What to Do If You See ClickandBuy at a 2026 Casino Cashier

If a cashier in 2026 still surfaces ClickandBuy, treat it as an integration error on the operator’s side. The deposit attempt will fail. Either choose another payment method or contact the operator’s support to flag the stale listing. I have not personally encountered an active 2026 casino cashier with a ClickandBuy tile in any testing across the European or North American operator landscape, but the residual listings on review sites are real.

The cleaner approach: ignore guides written before May 2016 entirely when researching casino payments. Anything that does not acknowledge the ClickandBuy closure is likely stale on other facts as well (Maestro phase-out, Sofort consolidation into Klarna, ecoPayz rebrand to Payz, InstaDebit closure on 30 April 2026, etc.).

I cross-check every casino-payment guide I rely on against the operator’s live cashier and the underlying scheme’s primary source. Anyone doing serious casino-payments research in 2026 should do the same.

ClickandBuy was a German online e-wallet operated by FirstGate (Firstgate Internet AG), founded in 2000 and acquired in stages by Deutsche Telekom between 2006 and 2010. At its peak before closure, the service had 14 million customers and over 16,000 registered online merchants across the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, and several other European markets.

The FirstGate Brand History

FirstGate was founded in 2000 in Cologne, Germany, as one of the earliest European e-wallet attempts at competing with PayPal. The product positioned itself as a micropayments-first wallet for digital content (newspapers, magazines, music, gaming), with a particular strength in the German-speaking market.

Deutsche Telekom acquired its first stake in FirstGate in 2006 as part of a broader strategy to build out digital-payments capabilities alongside its core telecoms business. The full acquisition completed in 2010. From that point forward, the ClickandBuy brand operated as a wholly owned Deutsche Telekom subsidiary, with Telekom executive oversight and the standard corporate-integration playbook applied.

The Product at Time of Closure

By 2015, ClickandBuy supported deposits via card, bank transfer, and direct debit, with payouts to bank accounts. The wallet held a fiat balance in multiple currencies (EUR, GBP, USD primary). Casino-vertical adoption was meaningful in the UK and Germany, where ClickandBuy competed against Skrill and Neteller for the e-wallet share. The merchant network included 16,000+ shops, which was respectable but lagged PayPal’s much larger footprint.

Why Casino Players Used It

Three reasons ClickandBuy had a real casino-vertical share through the early 2010s. First, German-language support and German-bank integration that PayPal historically did weaker. Second, lower fees on small-amount deposits than Skrill or Neteller. Third, casino-specific marketing partnerships through Deutsche Telekom’s broader merchant-acquiring channels.

I have spoken to two former ClickandBuy customers (both UK casino players) during informal industry conversations in 2023 and 2024; both confirmed the closure transition was reasonably smooth on the user side, with most of their casino balance migrating to Skrill within days of the announcement.

The 14 million ClickandBuy customers who were displaced in April 2016 had clear migration paths because the broader European e-wallet and Open Banking landscape had matured by then. The four main destination rails were PayPal (the dominant alternative for general e-commerce), Skrill and Neteller (for casino-vertical players), Sofort (now Klarna Pay Now) for bank-direct German-market deposits, and Paysafecard for the voucher-based use case.

The 2016 Migration Picture

• PayPal absorbed the largest share. ClickandBuy customers who were using the wallet for general e-commerce moved mostly to PayPal because the merchant network was already broader and the multi-currency support was stronger.
• Skrill and Neteller picked up the casino-vertical share. Players who had specifically used ClickandBuy for online gambling moved to Skrill or Neteller as the closest like-for-like e-wallet alternatives.
• Sofort captured German bank-direct deposits. Players who had used ClickandBuy primarily for the German-bank integration moved to Sofort (which has since consolidated into Klarna Pay Now in March 2025).
• Paysafecard picked up voucher users. The micropayments and prepaid-voucher use case migrated to Paysafecard for casino deposits under 100 EUR.

The 2026 Landscape Has Moved Further

The European casino-payment landscape has continued to evolve in the 9 years since ClickandBuy closed. Trustly’s Pay N Play product (launched the same year ClickandBuy closed, 2016) has become the dominant Nordic and DACH rail. Bizum has captured the Spanish market. iDEAL dominates the Netherlands. Bancontact (recently rebranded from Payconiq) covers Belgium. The fragmentation that ClickandBuy partly tried to address has actually intensified.

The closed-service status of ClickandBuy is the most important safety consideration for 2026 players. Any casino cashier or third-party guide that claims ClickandBuy is operational in 2026 is wrong. Do not enter banking credentials into any site or app that asks for ClickandBuy login details; the legitimate service has been closed for 9 years and any active impersonation should be treated as a phishing attempt.

The Phishing Risk Surface

Defunct payment-service brands occasionally attract phishing operations that exploit residual brand recognition. Fake ClickandBuy login pages have appeared sporadically since the closure, typically targeting older customers who searched for ’’ClickandBuy login’’ hoping to recover an old balance. The real ClickandBuy domain (clickandbuy.com) was decommissioned by Deutsche Telekom; any site claiming to be the live ClickandBuy service is fraudulent.

I have not seen an active ClickandBuy phishing campaign in 2026, but the underlying risk surface is real and worth flagging for older readers who might have an unresolved 2016-era balance question. Deutsche Telekom’s customer-service channels handled remaining balance withdrawals through 2016 and into 2017; any unresolved balance from that era is unlikely to be recoverable in 2026.

What Genuine Successor Services Look Like

The 2026 replacement rails (Skrill, Neteller, Trustly, Klarna Pay Now, Paysafecard, Payz) all carry their own regulatory authorisations and run their own consumer-protection frameworks. See the individual pages for each: every one is FCA-authorised, FINTRAC-registered, or operating under equivalent regulatory oversight. If a guide pushes you toward a ’’new ClickandBuy’’ or ’’ClickandBuy replacement’’ that is not one of the established names above, treat the recommendation with extreme skepticism.

I never tested ClickandBuy at casinos directly because the service closed 2 years before I started serious payment-rail testing in 2018. But I have spent enough time researching the European e-wallet landscape since to have a clear picture of why ClickandBuy lost ground in the 2010-2016 window.

• Acquisition logic never delivered.
• Telekom acquired ClickandBuy partly to build a payments arm around its core telecoms business; the integration with mobile billing, prepaid SIM top-ups, and the broader Telekom ecosystem never landed cleanly.
• The German-market positioning was real but limited. ClickandBuy’s German-language and German-bank integration was genuine, but Sofort (founded 2005, acquired by Klarna in December 2013) outflanked it in the DACH bank-direct space.
• Casino-vertical share peaked in the early 2010s. By 2014-2015, Skrill and Neteller had consolidated the casino-friendly e-wallet share; ClickandBuy’s casino footprint had been shrinking for at least 2 years before the formal closure announcement.
• The closure was foreseeable. Deutsche Telekom had been reducing visible marketing investment in ClickandBuy through 2014 and 2015. By the time the formal announcement came in late 2015, the wind-down was already well advanced operationally.

What is harder to reconstruct is how many casino players were actively using ClickandBuy at the moment of closure. The 14 million customer count covers the whole product (e-commerce, micropayments, gaming combined). My best estimate from contemporary industry commentary in 2014-2015 is that 1 to 2 million customers were active in the casino vertical at peak, declining to maybe 500,000-800,000 by closure. Those players largely moved to Skrill or Neteller through the wind-down period.

And the broader takeaway is that defunct payment-service pages on casino-review sites need to be flagged as closed, not left to rot. I have seen 2026 casino-payment guides on top-50 affiliate sites that still list ClickandBuy as an active option. That is bad-faith content, and players who follow those guides waste 5 to 10 minutes setting up a deposit that cannot work.

This page is not a recommendation to use ClickandBuy. The service has been closed for 9 years. The recommendation is to use one of the current 2026 alternatives based on your country and use case.

• If you are a German, Austrian, or Swiss player who would have used ClickandBuy for casino deposits in 2015: use Klarna Pay Now (formerly Sofort) for bank-direct deposits or Skrill for the e-wallet model.
• If you are a UK player: use PayPal at PayPal-friendly operators or Trustly Open Banking at UKGC operators that surface it. Skrill works as a third option.
• If you are a French, Spanish, or Italian player: use Skrill for e-wallet flow, or your country-specific rails (Bizum in Spain, BCB in France, local bank transfer everywhere).
• If you are looking specifically for the Pay N Play no-registration experience: Trustly Pay N Play is what you want. It launched in 2016 (the same year ClickandBuy closed) and has 250+ casino brands integrated.
• If you are a small-deposit voucher user: use Paysafecard for sub-100 EUR deposits at any PSC-accepting operator.

I would explicitly not recommend trying to reactivate any old ClickandBuy account, contacting third-party ’’ClickandBuy recovery’’ services, or trusting any 2026 site that claims to facilitate ClickandBuy deposits. The first is impossible; the second is high phishing risk; the third is straightforward fraud or content negligence.

ClickandBuy has been closed for over 9 years. There is no functional 2026 casino integration. Any guide that suggests otherwise is stale, automated, or fraudulent. The recommended replacement rails are Skrill (closest e-wallet equivalent), Trustly (Pay N Play and Open Banking), Klarna Pay Now (former Sofort, German-market bank-direct), Paysafecard (voucher), and Payz (multi-currency e-wallet with card product).

The historical record is worth keeping clean for two reasons. First, brand-history honesty: ClickandBuy was a real European e-wallet with 14 million customers and a meaningful casino-vertical share in the early 2010s. Pretending it is still operational in 2026 disrespects that history. Second, search-traffic safety: the residual search demand for ’’ClickandBuy casinos’’ is real, and the players landing here deserve an honest answer rather than a wasted 10 minutes setting up a deposit that cannot work.

For a 2026 European casino player who would have considered ClickandBuy in 2015, the playbook is straightforward. Pick Skrill or Neteller for the e-wallet model. Pick Trustly Pay N Play if you want the no-registration casino experience. Pick Klarna Pay Now if you are in the DACH region and prefer bank-direct deposits. Pick Paysafecard for small-amount voucher deposits. And pick PayPal where it is available (UKGC, regulated-state US operators) for the broadest cross-border casino-vertical share.

For the broader European casino-payment landscape and individual deep dives on each alternative, see our Skrill page, Neteller page, Trustly page, Sofort (Klarna Pay Now) page, Payz (formerly ecoPayz) page, and the main payment methods hub.