A website will launch next week to curb online betting by gamblers who fear they may be addicted.

Internet gamblers will be able to sign up to the Global Self Exclusion Database website, which will prevent them from opening an account with an online gaming site.

The launch comes at a time of sharp growth in UK online gambling. Its audience has grown almost 50 per cent in the past year, with 10m users visiting a gambling website in the three months to April, according to Nielsen Net Ratings.

Partygaming, an online gaming site, said earlier this year that its first-quarter revenues rose by 54 per cent to $342.6m (£185m), after record numbers signed up to play poker.

During the second half of England's World Cup game against Trinidad and Tobago on Thursday, nearly a quarter of a million fans visited sports and gambling websites.

Emap, the publishing group behind FHM, the lads' magazine, and Cantor Gaming yesterday announced that they would launch an online casino on FHM.com.

While gamblers are predominantly men, more women are signing up for online gambling services - females now accounted for 40 per cent of the total, said Nielsen Net Ratings.

According to GamCare, the gambling charity, a quarter of addicts using the charity's online message forum are female. Women represented only 2 per cent of its counselling clients in 2000. This grew to 18 per cent last year.

The overall number of people contacting GamCare's forum has also been increasing, with more than 40,000 people visiting the site in the three months to December.

The Global Self Exclusion Database is developed by a US ID verification company called Aristotle, backed by Rupert Murdoch and Hambrecht, the US financial services group, and will be launched on Tuesday.

About 80 per cent of gambling sites licensed in the UK use Aristotle's ID verification system.

Should an individual whose name is on the list attempt to open an account with a participating gaming site, the database will block the user's access to the site. Gamblers can sign up for as long they like and, after a seven-day cooling-off period, can remove themselves from the database.

John Phillips, chief executive of Aristotle, said that the internet was making it easier for people to gamble and could make addicts of those who did not even know they had a gambling problem.