Is the UK Illegal Gambling Market Really Shrinking?

Key Points

• The UKGC got around 7.7 million bad gambling URLs shut down between July and September. That’s roughly 52 times the total from the quarter before.
• They surveyed thousands of people to get their estimates, but only managed to track 128 users who are using dodgy sites. That’s nowhere near enough for any real in-depth analysis.
• There were 586 dodgy gambling sites that people in Britain could still get to in September, 4 per cent more than a year earlier. Researchers have different ideas on what’s going on in the black market.

During the spring, the UK Gambling Commission asked search engines to yank around 1,600 dodgy gambling links every day. Then, between July and September, they referred around 7.7 million bad URLs, more than 83,000 a day.

But get this, during the same week, the regulator described the sort of people who gamble on dodgy sites as being “low and stable.” Both of those statements can be true at the same time, it’s not like one automatically cancels the other out. But neither one actually proves that the black market is shrinking. In this piece, we’re talking about gambling services offered to people in Great Britain without a Gambling Commission licence.

Half-Year Referrals Smash Last Year’s Total

U.K. Gambling Commission boss Sarah Gardner gave us the bigger picture at the CEO briefing on November 5th. Apparently the number of dodgy URLs coming in over the first six months of this year was a whopping 7,824,932, up on the 397,527 reported in the whole of the 2025 to 26 financial year.

The number of URLs taken down actually reached 3,038,969 in the first six months, which is way up from the 266,667 we saw last year. Of those, 3,019,291 came in the last quarter, which leaves very little room to breathe for April to June.

Lots of other enforcement figures also went up. The Commission sent out 1,005 “stop doing it” letters during the six months, compared to the 741 they sent in the same timeframe last year.

Pages Vs Websites: What All Those URL Figures Really Mean

The URL figures can be misleading because a single dodgy website can have thousands of individual pages inside it. So, between July and September, the Commission took down 1,835 websites. That works out to an average of around 4,200 URLs per website.

That’s a simple calculation based on two published figures, not an actual headcount of the number of pages on each site. The same calculation for April to June gives you an average of around 400 URLs per website.

Website referrals have gone up roughly fivefold, while URL referrals shot up around 52 times. This suggests that the reason for the increase may not be because there are loads more dodgy sites, but because they’re being reported at the individual page level.

Removals actually represented a smaller share of the total referrals. The ratio fell from around 67% in 2025 to 26 to around 39% between April and September.

Dashboard Finds 586 Illegal Websites Accessible From Britain

The Commission’s dashboard of illegal gambling data released on 5 November examines illegal gambling supply, demand, and enforcement activity.

As per the dashboard, 586 illegal gambling websites were accessible from Britain in September. This number was 4% greater than the figure seen in the same month a year ago. But, the figure was 4% less than the average number of illegal gambling websites during the previous three months. Thus, depending on the comparison period, the trend is different.

It is noteworthy that the Commission has also mentioned that the website count is from search-based monitoring and not a complete count of illegal gambling websites in the market.

There has been enforcement activity on 311 websites between July and September, 38% more than the previous quarter. This is because the Commission’s outcome figures are announced after one quarter due to the need to measure effects over three months of traffic.

The decline in the traffic estimated by 18% is for websites from the previous quarter. Likewise, the finding that 77% of disrupted websites saw a fall in their estimated traffic is also based on this lagged measure.

It is to be noted that the Commission has mentioned that these traffic changes cannot be considered a result of its enforcement efforts.

Engagement estimates with the identified illegal websites were 12% more than the three-month average but were 11% less than September 2025. Illegal gambling websites among Google search results of generic queries monitored by the Commission were 4%.

Survey Uncovers 2.5% of Online Gamblers Had a Run-In With Illegal Sites, But The Sample Size Falls Short

Website stats can give you a sense of how many shady sites are out there, but they don’t give you the whole picture when it comes to the number of people actually putting their money on those black market platforms. The Commission wanted to get a better idea of just who was gambling on the sly, so they conducted a survey to estimate user numbers.

The Phase 4 report from the Commission covers 14,257 adults, across four different survey waves run between April 2025 and April 2026. But, out of those, let’s be honest, it’s a pretty narrow sample. Among the 3,569 respondents who’d actually gambled online in the past year, and not just dropped by the National Lottery stall, 2.5% showed signs of having taken a punt on an illegal site recently.

Another 1.5% showed signs of having had a flutter earlier in the year, while 14% displayed some pretty faint signs that they might have had a dabble with an illegal site. And if you take that down to the entire adult sample, then those numbers drop to 0.6% and 0.4%, respectively.

The way they measure this is with something called the Illegal Gambling Index, basically a tally of seven different self-reported behaviours, weighted according to how likely they are to be a sign of illegal activity, and how recently they happened.

The numbers show that men and younger adults are more likely to have had a go at an illegal site, although these figures are of the entire demographic group. In the last four weeks, 0.9% of men said they’d gambled on an illegal site, compared to 0.4% of women.

Young adults aged 18 to 24 were the worst offenders, 2.2% of them showed signs of having gambled on an illegal site in the past year. The good news is that most of that activity had already happened more than four weeks ago.

The whole lot of this is based on a tiny group of 128 people who got classified as illegal gambling users. Of those, 58% said they’d used a website they knew was a dodgy one, not listed on GamStop.

Separately, 56.6% of those users said they’d tried to cancel a withdrawal, and that’s been forbidden by licensed operators since 2021.

GCI and IFHA Give Us A Couple Of Different Takes On The Illegal Market

Gambling Compliance International (GCI) takes a different approach to counting users; its president, Ismail Vali, reckons it’s the money that matters. He spoke to iGaming Business and told them that counting users doesn’t give you the whole picture when it comes to the cash flowing in from the black market.

According to the Campaign for Fairer Gambling, which commissioned GCI’s research, the black market brought in around £780 million in 2025, which is just under 9% of the online gambling market. In 2024 that was around £580 million and 7%, so it looks like the black market is on the rise.

That estimate only includes betting and casino websites though, and comes from a commercial research firm who are pretty upfront about the limitations of the data. Vali reckons that even with a relatively small number of users, the black market can still rake in a pretty penny.

And then there’s horseracing, the International Federation of Horseracing Authorities has a different take on things, with a study of 301 shady betting websites.

The report from the anti-illegal betting council of the IFHA says that between January and July 2026, they found that for every 100 visits to legal betting sites, there were 19.4 visits to black market sites.

Commission’s Focus Moves From Illegal Operators’ Websites To Money

On 9 November, the Commission stated that it plans to focus on the money and business models used by the illegal operators, rather than on their websites.

Since January, it has referred over £40 million of suspected funds to partner agencies for a possible asset freeze. A referral does not necessarily mean that the funds were frozen, which is important to keep in mind while evaluating the above figure.

The Commission’s Sue Young sent a clear message to illegal operators: “We are coming after you, your business and your money”.

Expert Analysis: Will More Enforcement Lead to Less Illegal Betting?

The 7.7 million number estimates the enforcement capacity of the Commission and not the size of the black market, we believe. Additional resources allowed the regulator to do more, while the new reporting standard increased the number of URLs accounted for. A regulator that counts URL removals among its key enforcement activities should provide information about such actions and their duration.

The second point that concerns us here is the use of the term “stable” by the Commission. Its characterisation of the latest survey as a “baseline” indicates that it does not yet possess enough historical data to define a reliable trend.

The statement by Sue Young contains some other figures too, and according to them, the estimated engagement is 11% lower compared to a year ago. However, the dashboard still accounts for 586 reachable websites of illegal operators in September, which was 4% higher than a year ago. The IFHA study gives several reasons for the decrease in traffic of illegal horseracing websites without mentioning enforcement as the principal one.

The GCI’s estimate of £780 million requires similar scrutiny. The study was commissioned by the Campaign for Fairer Gambling, and the methodology is proprietary. It is possible that a relatively small number of users can generate large amounts of illegal revenue, but the survey of the Commission cannot confirm this.