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Report

Illegal gambling - Findings from an open banking data analysis

An analysis of directly observed illegal gambling transactions in anonymised banking transaction data linked to individuals’ survey responses.

Published
28 October 2026

Last updated
28 October 2026 - Changes

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  1. Contents
  2. Limitations

Limitations

This report provides objective evidence on financial transactions between British residents and illegal gambling operators. It provides evidence on gambling harms suffered by some people who use illegal gambling companies, as well as the context and payment types sometimes used in these transactions. However, we note several limitations to this analysis.

First, we note that this evidence is taken from a sample of the overall population that is not nationally representative. The dataset slightly over-represents men and under-represents women, especially women over 55. It also only includes people who have chosen to share their banking data anonymously for research for a small incentive.

Second, we only consider cash transactions from institutions that support open banking protocols. Other types of transactions, for example transactions with unlicensed operators made in cryptocurrencies, are not captured. Also, we only capture transactions with a subset of illegal operators, some of whom are not believed to be currently operating in the Great Britain. Therefore, there may be a significant number of transactions with illegal operators in the dataset that are not identified, including by those individuals for whom we have detected some transactions with illegal operators. This means that the data in this report cannot be used to estimate the size of the illegal gambling market either in absolute terms or in comparison to licensed gambling, where we believe we can identify the vast majority of transactions in this dataset.

Third, despite evidence that individuals interacting with the illegal market are much more likely to have an elevated Problem Gambling Severity Index (PGSI) at some stage, the study design does not permit allow any causal analysis between spending with illegal operators and harm.

Finally, as the methodology in this report relies on the identification of illegal gambling companies via other means, the methods used here cannot be used to proactively identify previously unknown illegal gambling operators.

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Illegal gambling - Findings from an open banking data analysis - Materials and methods
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