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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.

Executive summary

This report explains our methodology to understand trends in consumer engagement with illegal gambling websites. By collecting data on this market, we can improve our understanding of how it operates and use this insight to inform work to disrupt it. This is helping the Gambling Commission achieve our strategic aim of making it difficult to provide illegal gambling at scale to consumers in Great Britain.

Our approach is still in development, and we have outlined key next steps to further improve this methodology. Whilst in development findings should be treated with caution.

We collected and analysed web traffic data from May 2024 to July 2025. This allowed us to estimate trends in engagement by consumers with illegal gambling websites over this period. Our key findings are as follows.

Around 1,000 unique illegal gambling websites were accessed by consumers in Great Britain.

There was no overall increase in engagement in illegal online websites by consumers from Great Britain (measured by the number of website visits and the duration of these visits).

Fluctuations in engagement took place over this period. There was a growth in estimated engagement in the summer and autumn of 2024, followed by a decline back to a level similar to that at the start of the period where data was collected. Further data collection and analysis is needed to understand if these changes are seasonal or associated with other factors.

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Illegal online gambling: Consumer engagement and trends - Introduction
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