Report
Prohibition of gambling on credit cards
This report focuses on research conducted around the prohibition of gambling on credit cards
Contents
- Executive summary
- Background and approach
- Methodology and limitations
- Operator Implementation and customer behaviour
- Credit cards and digital wallets
- Deposits prior to the introduction of the ban
- Displacement to other high-cost credit sources
- Displacement to illegal sources of funds
- Bypassing the ban through other behaviours
- Displacement to unlicensed gambling sites
- Inconvenience to leisure gamblers
- Conclusions and next steps
- Appendices
Methodology for key sources
Many of the findings detailed in this report are based on two sources, our Online Tracker survey and the Commission’s Consumer Voice research. The core details of each approach are detailed as follows.
Online Tracker methodology
- an online survey, conducted by Yonder Consulting through their panel
- a nationally representative sample of approximately 2,000 adults per wave aged 18+ in Great Britain
- data collected quarterly, with the data from 2020 onwards collected during some form of national or local restrictions
- base sizes for different questions can be found in the respective charts
- the questions have evolved since their inception in December 2018 as our understanding of motivations for using borrowed money to gamble has improved
- where changes in question phrasing may have impacted the trend data, this has been noted on the respective charts.
A list of questions for each wave can be found in the appendices.
Consumer Voice methodology
- commissioned by us and completed by 2CV
- an eight-day online community in February 2021 with 30 respondents, 29 of whom fully completed the exercises
- the respondents explored multiple topics, including the impact of the credit card ban and process of making complaints
- all respondents had gambled online in the previous 12 months and 20 had gambled with a credit card prior to April 2020
- the sample contained people who had made, or wanted to make, a complaint about a gambling operator
- due to the make-up of the sample, a larger proportion of participants scored at the higher end of the Problem Gambling Severity Index (PGSI)
- there was a 50-50 male/female split, with an even spread of ages, socio-economic groups, ethnicity, working status, family status, and location.
Limitations of the ban and evaluation
Last updated: 2 November 2021
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