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Report

Illegal online gambling: Consumer engagement and trends

The Gambling Commission’s report into estimated trends in consumer engagement with illegal gambling websites.

Published
25 September 2025

Last updated
7 October 2025 - Changes

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Contents

Next steps

Key point summary

Key points in this section are as follows:

  • our methodology is still in development – actions are needed to further improve our approach and the accuracy of estimates
  • we have set out our existing plans. These will be implemented over the coming months
  • we welcome input and ideas from stakeholders on other opportunities to improve this approach.

Our data analysis work has provided valuable information to inform disruption activity. It has also generated data to help us estimate trends in consumer engagement with illegal gambling websites.

Our approach, however, is still a methodology in development. We welcome further conversations with stakeholders to help us improve the estimates in this analysis.

Our key next steps in terms of improving this methodology include:

  1. We will continue to monitor research on consumer motivations and update our search terms to reflect changing trends. We also recognise the need to explore opportunities to collect data related to social media gambling (on platforms such as Telegram) and within Apps.
  2. Further work is needed to understand the margins of error associated with web traffic estimates. There is an opportunity to work with licensed operators to compare the actual web traffic they experience and compare that to Similarweb estimates. We also plan to trial other web traffic intelligence platforms and compare results from different sources. Both of these would allow us to calibrate the web traffic estimations for illegal gambling websites to more accurately reflect the true traffic.
  3. We will obtain more data on Virtual Private Network (VPN) use in larger consumer surveys such as the Gambling Survey for Great Britain. We are also exploring how we can use open banking data to track changes in VPN subscription payments and are monitoring data on VPN downloads from App stores.
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Illegal gambling: Consumer engagement and trends - Conclusions Next section
Illegal gambling: Consumer engagement and trends - Annexes
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