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Report

Raising Standards for consumers - Compliance and Enforcement report 2020 to 2021

The Gambling Commission's report on Compliance and Enforcement action 2020 to 2021

  1. Contents
  2. Illegal gambling
  3. Illegal lotteries on social media

Illegal lotteries on social media

We are seeing an increase in illegal lotteries on social media. During this financial year, a total of 823 instances were identified where an allegation of a social media platform either hosting or advertising illegal gambling was received.

Reports signify each instance of notification of illegal gambling via a social media platform and in some instances, more than one report has been submitted in relation to a single subject. In addition, upon further assessment, 391 of the reports demonstrated no evidence of illegal activity and so no further action was taken.

Where more than one social media platform has been utilised for a single instance of illegal gambling, each platform will have been counted individually. The 823 reports can be broken down as follows:

Platforms used for illegal gambling
Hosted and or facilitated Advertised and or promoted Total
Facebook 664 65 729
Instagram 27 20 47
Snapchat 0 1 1
Twitter 5 18 23
YouTube 6 12 18
WhatsApp 0 2 2
Reddit 0 1 1
Twitch 2 0 2
Total 704 119 823

Facebook accounted for the highest volume of reports received, (this includes Instagram) followed by Twitter and YouTube.

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Consumer guidance on unlicensed websites
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Issues identified and actioned
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