Gambling Commission chief pledges to step up efforts to combat illegal betting on black market

The Gambling Commission intends to ramp up its use of data to combat illegal betting which a report last month claimed had risen to more than £4 billion a year.

In a blog posted on the Gambling Commission website, chief executive Andrew Rhodes said the organisation had been “particularly vigilant and active in our work to disrupt this market” using methods such as removing URLs from search engines.

This had resulted in 750 ‘cease and desist’ notices being issued, 50,000 URLs being removed by Google and 255 websites taken down since April.

Gambling operators and figures within British racing have frequently attributed the growth of the black market to the introduction of affordability checks on punters. Some have also warned that proposals to increase tax on regulated gambling operators could also act as a boost to illegal operators.

A report last month by Frontier Economics, commissioned by the Betting and Gaming Council, concluded that over £4bn was staked annually in Britain with unregulated and underground gambling operators following a survey of more than 6,000 people.

Rhodes said: “We are particularly vigilant and active in our work to disrupt [the illegal] market and through collaboration with others, have made good progress in frustrating illegal online operators.

“But we also understand there are concerns that when new regulations are introduced, there is a risk that some consumers might be displaced. The solution is not to avoid bringing in well-targeted and proportionate new regulations – especially where there are clear problems that need to be solved in improving our regulatory regime. We must also ensure that we avoid any unintended consequence of increased use of unlicensed operators.”

Andrew Rhodes: "vigilant and active" in effort to disrupt illegal market

Rhodes said the Gambling Commission would be taking an “evidence-led approach” to the black market, with a methodology paper released outlining the body’s processes and intentions.

Potential illegal operations had been found and monitored using search engine terms around the perceived main motivations for accessing the black market, such as ‘avoiding Know Your Customer checks’, ‘self-exclusion through GAMSTOP’, and ‘being banned from licensed sites’.

The Gambling Commission said it would seek to extend its monitoring of illegal betting sites and include social media sites and online video streaming operators, although it acknowledged the challenge of identifying operators using encrypted messaging apps such as WhatsApp.

The commission’s findings will be posted in “late spring 2025” and Rhodes said: “Increased use of data analytics is at the heart of our corporate strategy. We are building our capacity to use data to make regulation more effective – and we are already deploying this in our work to tackle unlicensed gambling.

“In addition to our work with data, it is important to reflect the experiences of people who gamble via the unlicensed market. We are currently conducting research with consumers through our Consumer Voice programme to better understand the pathways into the unlicensed market, and consumers’ drivers and motivations for using unlicensed websites. The programme is also exploring the experiences of consumers who are not aware the sites that they are using are not licensed.”

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