Bot Verification Blocks Access to EWCA Crim Case
Summary
BAILII deployed Anubis, a proof-of-work anti-bot protection system, on this England and Wales Court of Appeal (Criminal Division) case page. The protection uses a Hashcash-style challenge to make mass scraping more computationally expensive. Users must disable JavaScript-blocking plugins like JShelter to proceed past the verification page. The underlying court case content (EWCA/Crim/2026/496) is inaccessible through automated means.
“You are seeing this because the administrator of this website has set up Anubis to protect the server against the scourge of AI companies aggressively scraping websites.”
About this source
GovPing monitors BAILII England & Wales Recent Decisions for new courts & legal regulatory changes. Every update since tracking began is archived, classified, and available as free RSS or email alerts — 208 changes logged to date.
What changed
No regulatory content change occurred. BAILII implemented a bot protection mechanism using proof-of-work technology to prevent automated scraping of court decisions. The Anubis system presents a JavaScript challenge that legitimate users must complete before accessing case content. AI companies and automated scrapers face increased computational cost to access the database.
Legal professionals and researchers relying on automated case-monitoring systems should note that bulk downloading from BAILII now requires implementing proof-of-work solutions compatible with the Hashcash scheme, or obtaining content through alternative legal channels such as The National Archives or commercial legal databases.
Archived snapshot
Apr 23, 2026GovPing captured this document from the original source. If the source has since changed or been removed, this is the text as it existed at that time.
Making sure you're not a bot!
Loading...
You are seeing this because the administrator of this website has set up Anubis to protect the server against the scourge of AI companies aggressively scraping websites. This can and does cause downtime for the websites, which makes their resources inaccessible for everyone.
Anubis is a compromise. Anubis uses a Proof-of-Work scheme in the vein of Hashcash, a proposed proof-of-work scheme for reducing email spam. The idea is that at individual scales the additional load is ignorable, but at mass scraper levels it adds up and makes scraping much more expensive.
Ultimately, this is a placeholder solution so that more time can be spent on fingerprinting and identifying headless browsers (EG: via how they do font rendering) so that the challenge proof of work page doesn't need to be presented to users that are much more likely to be legitimate.
Please note that Anubis requires the use of modern JavaScript features that plugins like JShelter will disable. Please disable JShelter or other such plugins for this domain.
Related changes
Get daily alerts for BAILII England & Wales Recent Decisions
Daily digest delivered to your inbox.
Free. Unsubscribe anytime.
About this page
Every important government, regulator, and court update from around the world. One place. Real-time. Free. Our mission
Source document text, dates, docket IDs, and authority are extracted directly from BAILII.
The summary, classification, recommended actions, deadlines, and penalty information are AI-generated from the original text and may contain errors. Always verify against the source document.
Classification
Who this affects
Taxonomy
Browse Categories
Get alerts for this source
We'll email you when BAILII England & Wales Recent Decisions publishes new changes.
Subscribed!
Optional. Filters your digest to exactly the updates that matter to you.