Commission confident of fuller UK illegal gambling picture but key detail needed

Gambling Commission data shows that illegal gambling consumption in the UK remains low overall, but the big question is not how many people are using unlicensed, offshore platforms, but how much money they are staking.

The Commission has been conducting research into illegal gambling activity over the past year, part of a wider remit to tackle unlicensed activity. The regulator was granted an extra £26m in the government’s 2025 budget to dedicate towards this task.

So far the research has focused heavily on how consumers engage with the black market.

The latest datasets show that engagement as a whole is low – just 0.6% of respondents in the latest Gambling Survey for Great Britain (GSGB) said they had used illegal gambling platforms at some point in the four weeks prior.

Another 0.4% had used illegal gambling sites at some point in the past 12 months, but not as recently as four weeks before being asked in the survey.

A further 4.6% demonstrated what the Commission calls “limite..