Commission confident of fulller UK illegal gambling picture but key detail needed…

Gambling Commission data shows that illegal gambling consumption in the UK remains low overall, but the big question is not how many people are using unlicensed, offshore platforms, but how much money they are staking. The Commission has been conducting research into illegal gambling activity over the past year, part of a wider remit to tackle unlicensed activity. The regulator was granted an extra £26m in the government’s 2025 budget to dedicate towards this task. So far the research has focused heavily on how consumers engage with the black market. The latest datasets show that engagement as a whole is low – just 0.6% of respondents in the latest Gambling Survey for Great Britain (GSGB) said they had used illegal gambling platforms at some point in the four weeks prior. Another 0.4% had used illegal gambling sites at some point in the past 12 months, but not as recently as four weeks before being asked in the survey. A further 4.6% demonstrated what the Commission calls “limited indications of engagement”, meaning some indications of engagement with illegal gambling over the prior 12 months but little evidence to suggest they had used one in the past four weeks. The Commission is overall confident that around 1% of Britain’s gamblers use illegal platforms as of April 2026, as Acting Chief Executive Officer, Sue Gardner, told industry leadership at the regulator’s annual CEO briefing this morning. All in all, the regulator believes that 94.4% of UK gamblers show no sign of using illegal gambling sites. “We want to kick crime out of gambling,” said Sue Young, the Commission’s Executive Director for Operations. “Illegal gambling poses risks to consumers and tackling it is a priority for the Commission and our partners.” Commission: full picture of illegal gambling within reach… Referencing the recently published data in the CEO briefing this morning, Gardner remarked that the Commission is confident it has made “a big step towards” achieving its goal of getting an idea of the scale of the illegal market. The information the regulator has gained from the GSGC is the “best data we’ve had on the use of the illegal market”, Gardner continued. She added that the understanding of how many people use the black market has provided a foundation for further action. “This in itself is a baseline and we can build trend data from this point which, again, we can and will make use of to evaluate and target our interventions,” she said. “And when combined with other data sources we have published, including last week’s innovative analysis of open banking data, it really starts to develop the picture of the illegal market.” However, as with any illegal activity or market, gaining a full understanding of the illegal gambling sector is far from easy. The Commission has acknowledged this challenge, but is nonetheless confident it will gain a full picture soon. So far, the regulator has an idea of how many Britons use illegal sites, and is building a profile of them. Men are much more likely to gamble illegally then women, for example, and particularly those in the 18-24 age group. The most worrying takeaway so far, however, is that a large percentage, if not the majority, of people using illegal sites are undeniably people suffering from problem gambling and gambling harm. Commission data released last week, based on a small study of gamblers’ transactions monitored via open banking, revealed that 45% of those studied with a Problem Gambling Severity Index (PGSI) score of eight or more had transacted with illegal sites. On top of that, a Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS) decision has further highlighted the issue the issue. The case involved a self-described problem gambler who gambled away nearly £25,000 with an illegal gambling platform in under three months. “While engagement with the illegal market from an overall population perspective appears low and stable from these indicators, there is a cohort of online gamblers who use these sites and research suggests those consumers who use illegal operators are more likely to experience harm,” the Commission’s Young concluded. “This new data will help make sure activity to protect consumers is informed by the best available evidence which is why we will continue to work across government, industry, technology and financial services to disrupt crime and protect consumers.”