A new Illegal Gambling Taskforce has been launched, aimed at tackling the difficulty in tracking and enforcing unregulated online gambling in the UK.
At least tens of millions of UK visits are made to illegal gambling sites monthly, but regulators have struggled for certainty– with vulnerable users increasingly swayed by unregulated gambling advertising that is forecast to reach half of all spending in the sector by next year.
Tim Livesley, head of Data Innovation at the Gambling Commission, cautiously noted that while the data it has constructed does not show any clear upswing in illegal gambling, more work needs to be done to understand the reality behind it.
He said: “What we haven’t seen in the trend of web traffic estimates is sustained growth over the two years that we’ve been collecting it– so I think that raises some interesting questions about what’s really going on.
“There’s definitely a question for us to understand the reliability of the data”.
Following a dramatic rise in online gambling in recent years, experts have struggled to assess the scale of illegal gambling – where consumers often use Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) to access sites which would otherwise be geo-blocked within the country.
VPNs work by spoofing a user’s location, circumventing geo-restrictions while making regulator tracking of visits by potentially vulnerable users significantly more difficult.
The new Illegal Gambling Taskforce will see regulators such as the Gambling Commission -as well as law enforcement, payment providers, tech platforms and trade-bodies- collaborating to gain better insight into the scale of the problem.
Gambling in the UK has undergone a seismic shift in recent years, with online casino, sports and other betting storming past in-person equivalents during the pandemic to account for £7.8bn in 2025, in a £12bn industry.
Young men, especially those aged 25-34 are the group most responsible for driving the change, with nearly a third of men in that cohort gambling online in a given month.
However, Livesley cautioned that while there was growth primarily among this cohort, all groups were seen to be gambling online in significant numbers.
He said: “It’s worth noting that engagement is also increasing amongst women– younger women– so it’s not just the young male demographic.”
Responding to the change, Livesley said that the Gambling Commission’s Data Innovation team had initially sought specific data in pursuit of enforcement efforts against illegal sites, but that they were now seeking to go much further.
He said: “We got into this as a team to try and generate the data to disrupt the market first– and then we started looking at that data and about how we could use it to gain research and evidence insights that we could publish to help people understand this market better.”
Following the dramatic rise in online gambling the Gambling Commission has been attempting to track illegal site visits to establish how much of a knock-on effect the trend is having, using SimilarWeb traffic data and internal figures and estimates.
But the method has a blind-spot, it cannot directly track VPN enabled visits – the very users most likely to be actually gambling on illegal sites.
The Commission has applied a 30% uplift to the figures in an attempt to account for this, but in a blog post last month Livesley noted that VPN use spiked following the introduction of the Online Safety Act last July, meaning the true figure could be considerably higher.
Unlike licensed operators, illegal sites are not required to offer age verification, deposit limits, or self-exclusion tools– meaning vulnerable users, including those who have already tried to ban themselves from gambling using safety tools, have no such protection.
Speaking ahead of the Gambling Taskforce announcement, Livesley said the Commission was working to expand the range of data it uses to better understand what might be pulling users away from the legal market.
Users doing well on legitimate sites only to have their accounts terminated, or being enticed onto illegal and decentralised sites by cryptocurrency proceeds they made have made were just some of the factors, Livesley said.
He added: “Attributing cause and effect to either our enforcement or one of the factors is really difficult.”
The difficulty the Gambling Commission has faced in tracking illegal gambling has been further complicated in recent years as advertisement spending promoting illegal gambling sites has exploded.
According to a report last month by media research group WARC, the unregulated share of gambling advertising within the UK was projected to grow from 16.2% in 2019 to almost half of all forecasted spending next year– and is set to eclipse legitimate advertising, passing 50% by 2028.
WARC’s report has suggested a reduction in the ability of regulated firms to promote their services due to the introduction of new taxes on gambling profits may be behind the shift.
It comes as the English Premier League has introduced a ban on Gambling retailers on front-of-shirt sponsorships for the upcoming season, curtailing traditional advertising streams for licensed betting companies.
The government has responded to the challenges on multiple fronts, not least with its new Illegal Gambling Taskforce.
In addition, last week a new independent gambling harms research group was launched, funded by £22m raised through the government’s Gambling Levy, citing the £1.4bn estimated cost of harmful gambling to the UK economy for its creation.
Where the Illegal Gambling Taskforce focuses on enforcement, Gambling Harms Research UK will aim to put the lived experience of gambling harms at its heart.
In a statement marking the launch, the Centre’s lived experience lead Martin Jones said: “Research isn’t an intellectual exercise sitting in isolation, it is and should be closely linked to real gambling harms affecting real people, as many of us know all too well.”
Jones, who has direct personal experience of gambling-related suicide, added: “We need to do much more to prevent these harms, and coordinating top quality research will support this, especially by exploring the more complex areas around suicide, algorithms, and financial data.”
Featured image credit: Chris F on Pexels
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