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Report

Illegal online gambling - Phase 1: Exploring consumer pathways into using illegal gambling websites

The Gambling Commission's report on the first phase of the Consumer Voice illegal gambling project.

Published
18 September 2025

Last updated
18 September 2025 - Changes

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Contents

Next steps

In this study, we have identified 8 potential indicators of engagement with illegal gambling websites for qualitative recruitment purposes. However, we wish to take these indicators into a more robust phase of research that will involve careful analysis of existing data to determine which potential indicators can accurately signify engagement in the illegal online space, particularly given those who gamble often struggle to identify whether they have used an illegal website.

Following this phase of research, our next step will be to use the analysis of existing data to inform a larger-scale quantitative survey, allowing us to validate the quantitative findings produced in this first phase. This will enable us to develop a set of questions to feed into the Gambling Survey for Great Britain (GSGB), which will allow for robust, ongoing tracking of consumer engagement with the online illegal market over time.

At the time of writing, the objectives of this stage have yet to be formulated but may include (whilst not being limited to):

  • eliciting, with confidence, the reliable indicators of illegal online gambling so that this activity can be tracked over time
  • attaining metrics that draw a distinction between consumers’ use of gambling websites that are not licensed in Great Britain but are licensed in other jurisdictions, and consumers gambling with companies that are not licensed by any jurisdiction
  • exploring the extent to which illegal online gambling is a main or peripheral activity
  • investigating the broader prevalence of the four different types of illegal website user identified in the qualitative stage of this research.
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Appendices - Illegal online gambling: Phase 1
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