The findings<\/a> stem from a UKGC research paper analyzing consumer banking transactions recorded between July 2018 and July 2026.<\/p>\nThe research also found that 17% of illegal gambling users had PGSI scores between three and seven, compared with 9% of licensed customers.<\/p>\n
However, the UKGC said that its findings do not establish whether using illegal gambling websites causes greater gambling harm.<\/p>\n
Illegal Gamblers Continue Using Licensed Operators<\/p>\n
The study also looked at the extent to which illegal gambling activity overlapped with licensed betting.<\/p>\n
Among the individuals with repeated transactions involving illegal operators, 91% also gambled with licensed companies.<\/p>\n
The UKGC said that it had found little evidence that customers stopped using regulated websites after beginning to gamble illegally.<\/p>\n
\u201cIllegal gambling is embedded within existing gambling behavior rather than triggering a sustained shift away from the licensed market,\u201d the report concluded.<\/p>\n
Of the 122 individuals in the report with at least two detected illegal gambling transactions, the average number of monthly licensed gambling transactions remained relatively stable following their first identified illegal transaction.<\/p>\n
They made an average of 24.8 licensed gambling transactions in the preceding month, compared with 23.7 in the following month.<\/p>\n
The findings suggest that illegal operators were used alongside regulated businesses rather than consistently replacing them.<\/p>\n
Detection Challenges & Market Sizing<\/p>\n
To conduct the study, the UKGC analyzed 157.2 million banking transactions from approximately 38,000 individuals using financial tracking data provided by YouGov.<\/p>\n
Researchers identified 3,426 transactions believed to involve illegal gambling operators, originating from 179 distinct individuals.<\/p>\n
Identifying illegal payments proved challenging. An initial attempt to match known illegal operator names against banking descriptions yielded limited results, primarily because black market operators rarely list their actual business names on financial descriptors.<\/p>\n
Investigators subsequently relied on recognized merchant categories and known transaction codes to trace suspected illegal payments.<\/p>\n
The difficulties underscored the technical challenge of detecting illegal gambling through conventional bank ledgers, which fail to track cryptocurrency transfers or alternative payment networks.<\/p>\n
As a result, the UKGC said the findings could not establish the size of Britain\u2019s illegal gambling market.<\/p>\n
Others have been less hesitant about putting numbers on the problem. In August, the Betting and Gaming Council warned that UK black market Premier League betting will hit \u00a31 billion ($1.36 billion) by the 2027\/28 season<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Gamblers in Britain who use illegal, unlicensed websites are more than seven times as likely to suffer from…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":900076,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[60],"tags":[97,259,260,283796],"class_list":["post-900075","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mental-health","tag-health","tag-mental-health","tag-mentalhealth","tag-ukgc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/900075","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=900075"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/900075\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/900076"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=900075"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=900075"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=900075"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/UKGC-1-2.png\")
Gambling Commission research suggested that problem gambling is more prevalent among users of unlicensed websites. (Image: UKGC)<\/p>\n