Unlicensed gambling sites held 71% of the online betting and casino market in Europe last year, capturing €80.65 billion. The regulated sector grew by 30% and earned €33.64 billion, but unlicensed platforms increased faster. Many governments acted to make gambling safer, yet these actions helped illegal operators attract people with offers such as tax-free bonuses. Unlicensed gambling operators in 2024 took 71% of the online casino and betting market in Europe, which equals €80.65 billion ($93.8 billion), while officials had trouble reducing the impact of crypto casinos, prediction markets, and sites without licenses during a year of massive sports activity.

Yield Sec released information on Tuesday showing illegal gross gaming revenue, meaning the difference between bets placed and payouts, jumped 53% from 2023. The company, Yield Sec, checks online markets using data and says illegal sites are those operating without a local license in target markets or countries where they accept players. Analysis shows that, across 27 countries in the European Union, unlicensed operators’ growth rate was higher than the regulated market, which reached €33.64 billion after rising 30%.

European Gambling Market Surges to €114.3 Billion

The full market increased to €114.3 billion, a gain of 46% compared to the previous year. The European Casino Association, which represents legal businesses, commissioned this study. Across Europe, stricter rules were created by authorities, who wanted gambling harm to go down, including tighter restrictions on bonuses, advertisements, and even product types. Yield Sec reported that new regulations allowed illegal sites to reach more people with fast sign-up, tax-free perks, and illegal streams of sporting events. Yield Sec founder Ismail Vali said in an interview that if no monitoring or enforcement happens, organised crime keeps expanding, and it is important for legal businesses to cooperate more than before.

Growth of Illegal Gambling Drives European Market

The boom followed a busy sports year, including events like the Paris Olympics and Euro 2024 football, and these occasions sent many new users straight to online betting, often with offshore companies holding no European license, Yield Sec noted. Rising costs for sports TV packages caused more people to search for pirated streams, which turned into a tool for offshore betting firms to pull in new clients, according to Yield Sec’s reporting.

Yield Sec explained that its market figures are based on tracking user traffic by artificial intelligence and human review on search pages, social sites, streaming platforms, and apps and then estimating the value from every visit for each operator. In total, the company found 6,200 illegal gambling operators active in the European Union last year. Their data covers many types of betting products and businesses, including some counted by others as grey market or just unregulated.

Yield Sec notes that offshore sites often hold Curacao licenses but target customers in countries where they have no right to run their service. The European Gaming & Betting Association wrote in a March report that the total online gross gaming revenue (GGR) in Europe, counting all EU states and the UK, was €47.9 billion in 2024. That statistic from EGBA also counts lotteries played online, which are not included in Yield Sec’s research.