Statistics and research release
Understanding consumer engagement with illegal online gambling
The Gambling Commission's research into consumer engagement with illegal online gambling.
Summary
Details
Our Corporate Strategy 2024 to 2027 sets the goal of making it difficult to provide illegal gambling at scale to consumers in Great Britain. While illegal gambling includes both online and land-based activity, our work to build the evidence base currently focuses on the online market. Illegal online gambling is made up of a wide range of activity - including websites, apps, social media and private social communities.
To be able to deliver the strategy we need to be able to understand how the illegal market operates, who is engaging with it, why, at what scale, and how it is best disrupted. We have begun to build as full a picture of online illegal gambling as we can by triangulating currently available evidence. We have also strengthened our work to disrupt the illegal market and understand the impact of this action.
Our work to date has involved undertaking primary research with consumers and accessing web traffic data to monitor engagement with illegal gambling websites. We have sought input from our Lived Experience Advisory Panel (LEAP), Industry Forum and from other areas of relevant expertise, such as affiliate platforms, and payment providers.
The scope of our work has been to explore:
- who is using the illegal online market, consumer awareness, and motivations
- levels of engagement and trends within the illegal online market
- what we are doing to disrupt this market and protect consumers – and insights into the impact of this work.
We recognise that illegal gambling also takes place in land-based environments, and that there are other areas of illegal online activity, such as gambling in apps and directly facilitated on social media platforms, such as Telegram.
We also note that there is ongoing concern around the role of novel products, which have ‘gambling-like’ features, but are constructed in a way which means they are not captured as gambling as defined in the Gambling Act 2005 – meaning we have no remit over them.
Full details of our work to date can be found in the following publications:
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