The ups and downs of estimating trends in consumer engagement with illegal online gambling
Our Head of Data Innovation Hub Tim Livesley introduces the second instalment in a series of reports examining the illegal gambling market in Great Britain, which focuses on trends in consumer engagement with illegal gambling websites.
Posted 30 September 2025 by Tim Livesley
Our Corporate Strategy sets the goal of using data and analytics to make gambling regulation more effective. A key area we are focusing on is the detection of illegal gambling websites and collection of data that will help us disrupt this activity. We want to make it as difficult as possible for illegal gambling to be offered at scale to consumers in Great Britain. Closer work between our data and enforcement teams is an important way we are achieving this.
We have now published an analysis of trends in consumer engagement with illegal gambling websites. This draws on data collected through our work to empower our enforcement approach with the right information to prioritise disruption activity. By automating the gathering of intelligence, we have freed-up resources which can be used to take action to make websites with the highest volumes of traffic unavailable. We are also able to collect this data more frequently than before – speeding up our response to illegal websites where traffic is growing. Our next publication on illegal online gambling will explain more about what this enforcement work looks like in practice and the impact of targeted disruption.
Although our main priority was to deliver these operational benefits, we recognise that our work with data analytics also provides an opportunity to understand trends in consumer engagement. Our latest report sets out how we have approached this and our initial findings.
Generating accurate and reliable estimates is challenging. When exploring an activity that is illegal, and therefore hidden, there are very few known facts. We have made estimates based on the best data available to us and have been clear about margins for error and caveats.
Another reason why it is difficult to estimate trends in this market is its dynamic nature – there is a constant flux of websites exiting the market and new ones replacing them. As a result of disruption actions, the websites that are used most frequently today are not the same as those which saw the highest traffic a few months ago. Obtaining historic trends is a challenge as we are not looking at a stable set of websites.
We have now collected data for a period of 15 months. This focuses on illegal gambling websites – available to consumers directly through search engine results and from links on affiliate marketing websites. These sites include a mix of traditional gambling products – such as slots, casino and betting – as well as more recently developed offerings – such as crypto casinos.
We are clear that our methodology is still in development and our data is an estimate. We have made assumptions around Virtual Private Network (VPN) usage and we know that some aspects of online illegal gambling are not fully captured by our approach – such as Apps which may facilitate illegal gambling.
One striking observation though is that we cannot see any evidence of an overall pattern of growth. We are often told this market is constantly growing – and definitive claims are made about what is driving this - but sustained growth is not visible in our data.
This finding – which we are still treating as indicative – should certainly not be taken to mean we don’t believe there is still a serious problem that we will continue to tackle. This market presents a risk to consumers, and we will use data to work harder and smarter to disrupt it.
We plan to make further improvements to the way we use this data to report trends. This will include more analysis to better understand the margins for error associated with web traffic estimates. For example, we would welcome opportunities to collaborate with licensed operators to verify accuracy of estimates. We also need to collect data over a longer period of time to assess whether fluctuations are seasonal or part of a longer-term trend.
We will be publishing more about our work with data later this year. This will include further analysis on the impact of disruption activity and exploration of the methods and challenges of estimating levels of expenditure associated with online illegal gambling.