Britain's gambling regulator has found that 45% of people using illegal gambling sites score eight or higher on the Problem Gambling Severity Index (PGSI), compared with 6% of customers of licensed operators. The UK Gambling Commission report puts problem gambling among illegal-site users at more than seven times the rate in the licensed market. CasinoBeats dates its publication to 28 October 2026; Casino.org and Yogonet give no date.
In the band below, scores of three to seven, sit 17% of illegal-site users against 9% of licensed customers.
The Commission said its findings do not establish whether using illegal sites causes greater gambling harm. Answering that would require PGSI scores for the same people before and after they first used an illegal site.
The report also looked at overlap between the two markets. Of the individuals with repeated transactions involving illegal operators, 91% also gambled with licensed ones. Among 122 people with at least two detected illegal transactions, the average number of licensed gambling transactions was 24.8 in the month before their first identified illegal transaction and 23.7 in the month after.
"Illegal gambling is embedded within existing gambling behavior rather than triggering a sustained shift away from the licensed market," the report concluded.
The study analysed 157.2 million banking transactions from about 38,000 people, using financial tracking data supplied by YouGov. Researchers flagged 3,426 transactions believed to involve illegal operators, coming from 179 distinct individuals. An initial attempt to match known illegal operator names against bank descriptions produced limited results, because such operators rarely appear under their real business names, so investigators turned to merchant categories and transaction codes. Casino.org and Yogonet give the data period as July 2018 to July 2026, though Casino.org attaches it to the transactions and Yogonet to the YouGov data.
The 179 individuals are under 0.5% of the sample, and the before-and-after comparison rests on 122 of them. Whether the PGSI percentages were measured on the same group is a question we have not been able to answer.
Only CasinoBeats reports that the transactions were sorted by a payment firm's categoriser, with any payment above a 50% gambling probability counted as gambling, and that only accounts supporting open banking were included. Casino.org and CasinoBeats both say the study cannot measure the size of Britain's illegal market. Casino.org attributes this to bank ledgers not tracking cryptocurrency or alternative payment networks, while CasinoBeats says crypto payments are excluded.
According to CasinoBeats alone, a separate Commission study, the Phase 3 Consumer Voice research released on 20 October 2026 and covering 4,007 people surveyed between 1 and 15 May 2026, named searches for sites "not on GamStop" as a main route into the illegal market.
Prepared with AI from independent sources and published automatically, without prior editorial review. How we use AI