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.
Materials and methods
Our dataset was gathered by YouGov and comprises Open Banking transactions gathered with informed consent from individuals for them to be used anonymously for research purposes. These records are linked via an anonymised unique identifier for each individual to other information previously collected by YouGov about them. This includes Problem Gambling Severity Index (PGSI) scores for many of the individuals.
The data comes from 38,000 individuals between July 2018 and July 2026. Transactions with licensed operators were identified using a gambling identification algorithm developed by Yaspa, which uses information from regulatory data, test purchasing and a machine learning algorithm to classify the probability that a transaction is with a gambling operator. Transactions were labelled as gambling if this probability was over 0.5. This analysis was conducted using Python and SQL with technical and infrastructure support provided as part of the Gambling Commission’s collaboration agreement with Warwick Business School.
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Illegal gambling - Findings from an open banking data analysis - Limitations
Last updated: 28 October 2026
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