Gambling Commission finds 91% of repeat illegal-site users also bet legally
Regulation2 min read
In brief
- The Gambling Commission's open-banking study found 91% of repeat illegal-site users also gambled with licensed operators.
- Licensed transactions did not fall substantially after users' first detected illegal payment, the Commission said.
- The Commission said the panel was not nationally representative and could not measure the illegal market's size.
- General betting duty is scheduled to move to a higher rate in April 2027.
The Gambling Commission has published its first open-banking study of the illegal gambling market, finding that 91% of people with repeated detected payments to unlicensed operators also gambled with licensed operators. The report was published on 28 October, according to the Commission.
According to the study, users' spending with licensed operators barely declined once their first illegal payment had been detected. The Commission described this as evidence that unlicensed betting tends to sit alongside regulated play instead of displacing it.
On harm, the report said problem gambling scores are far higher among people paying unlicensed operators than among customers of licensed sites.
The Commission acknowledged several constraints on its approach. Transactions were classified by a payment firm's categoriser, which treated a payment as gambling when its gambling probability exceeded 50%. Accounts without open banking support fall outside the sample, meaning cryptocurrency payments are excluded. In addition, the method picks up payments to just a portion of illegal operators.
The Commission cautioned that the panel data cannot be taken as nationally representative, nor can it offer a definitive picture of the illegal market. In its view, the data also cannot establish the market's size, and it does not demonstrate that illegal sites are the cause of the harm.
Searches for sites "not on GamStop" were identified as a leading route into the illegal market in the Commission's Phase 3 Consumer Voice research, which was released on 20 October 2026. Fieldwork for that survey ran from 1 to 15 May 2026 and involved 4,007 respondents who had gambled online during the preceding four weeks.
The report was published in Budget week. Online gaming duty has stood at 40% since April 2026.
The Betting and Gaming Council has drawn a connection between rising costs and the black market. Its chief executive, Grainne Hurst, contended that raising taxes on the regulated sector would strengthen the appeal of illegal operators. The BGC also pointed to projections indicating that a 25% rate might endanger almost 9,000 jobs and leave almost 1,000 betting shops and casinos either shut or facing serious closure risk.
General betting duty is scheduled to move to a higher rate in April 2027.