Britain’s regulator says website takedowns are no longer enough. It will now target the payments, advertising and content that keep unlicensed sites running.
Great Britain’s Gambling Commission says it will widen its campaign against illegal gambling beyond taking down websites. It now plans to go after the payments, advertising and game supply that unlicensed operators depend on. The regulator announced the shift on 9 November 2026, at the start of the first Illegal Gambling Awareness Week.
“If you run an illegal gambling operation, we are coming after you, your business and your money,” said Sue Young, the Commission’s Executive Director of Operations, in the regulator’s statement.
What the Commission announced
In its release, the Commission said it “has started broadening its focus beyond website disruption to targeting the money, assets and business models that support illegal operators”. The message had already been given to UK industry leaders at the Commission’s CEO Briefing the week before, and to international regulators at the International Association of Gaming Regulators (IAGR) conference in October.
Young set out the next steps. “We’ve already shown we can take down and disrupt individual websites and now we’re going further,” she said. “That means us interfering with illegal operators’ whole business models, disrupting their payments, hindering their advertising and stopping them from obtaining the games and sportsbooks they so heavily rely on.”
She added that since January the Commission had “referred over £40 million of suspected criminal funds to partner agencies for potential asset freezing”, and that it was still working with law enforcement to seize cash at illegal land-based gambling operations. The release does not name the partner agencies or say how much of that money has been frozen.
The numbers behind the claim
The Commission listed its disruption activity so far. In the 2026/27 financial year to date, it has issued more than 1,000 cease-and-desist notices to illegal operators. It has referred more than 7.8 million URLs to search engines, and more than 3 million have been removed from search results. More than 2,200 websites have been referred for disruption action.
URL referrals rose from 147,721 in the first quarter of the year to 7.7 million in the second, an increase of more than 5,000%, according to the Commission. These are activity measures: they record what the regulator did, not how much illegal gambling there is.
How big is the illegal market?
The announcement followed new evidence the Commission published on 5 November, alongside an updated Illegal Gambling Data Dashboard. The figures come from the Gambling Survey for Great Britain (GSGB), the Commission’s main official survey of gambling behaviour, which now includes questions designed to show whether a respondent is likely to be using an illegal site, “whether they realise it or not”.
Across the whole adult population, including people who do not gamble, 94.4% of respondents showed no sign of using an illegal gambling website. A further 0.6% had used one in the past four weeks, and another 0.4% in the past 12 months but not the past four weeks.
Among people who had gambled online in the past year, the figures are higher. 2.5% had used an illegal site in the past four weeks, and a further 1.5% in the past 12 months but not the past four weeks. Use was higher among men than women. Over 12 months it was more common among younger adults, particularly those aged 18 to 24, while in the past four weeks use was most visible among 25 to 34-year-olds.
“While engagement with the illegal market from an overall population perspective appears low and stable from these indicators, there is a cohort of online gamblers who use these sites,” Young said in the 5 November release. She added that research suggests those consumers “are more likely to experience harm”.
Industry-funded research paints a different picture. A study by the International Federation of Horseracing Authorities (IFHA), reported by iGaming Business on 9 November, examined 301 betting websites used in Britain: 74 licensed and 227 unlicensed. According to iGaming Business, the unlicensed sites in the first seven months of 2026 recorded 19.4 visits for every 100 visits to licensed sites. Monthly unique visits to the illegal sites in the sample rose from 1.8 million in 2022 to more than 25 million in 2025. Casino People has not yet seen the full IFHA report. The two sets of figures measure different things (web traffic to a sample of sites versus survey responses from individuals) and should not be compared directly.
Who is affected
The new approach is aimed at the businesses that operate around illegal sites as well as the sites themselves. The Commission names three areas: payment processing, advertising, and the supply of games and sportsbook products. Payment providers, ad networks and the studios and platforms that supply content are therefore likely to face more questions about where their services end up. The Commission said its wider work includes “increased collaboration on intelligence sharing, early reporting, data and evidence support”.
For licensed operators, the Commission presents the campaign as protection for the legal market. It describes its aims as better protecting consumers, supporting “legitimate licensed operators” and tackling criminality linked to illegal gambling.
For consumers in Great Britain, the risk is practical. An unlicensed site has no obligation to verify age, offer self-exclusion through the GAMSTOP scheme, keep customer funds safe or settle a dispute. Anyone unsure whether a site is licensed can check it against the Commission’s public register at gamblingcommission.gov.uk.
The wider European picture
Britain is not the only market struggling with this. At the SiGMA conference in Rome last week, the head of Denmark’s regulator, Spillemyndigheden, said the 93% “channelisation” rate long cited as evidence of Denmark’s success “isn’t really true any longer”. Channelisation is the share of gambling that goes through licensed operators. He made the remarks in a panel reported by iGaming Business on 6 November. At the same event, Spain’s DGOJ joined regulators from Cyprus, Greece and the Czech Republic to discuss blocking unlicensed sites, payments, social media and mirror domains, according to the DGOJ’s own account of the panel.
What happens next
Illegal Gambling Awareness Week, led by IAGR, runs until 13 November. The Commission says it will keep working with law enforcement, the industry, technology companies and the financial sector to identify and disrupt illegal activity, and its dashboard will track progress over time.
What the Commission has not yet set out is how it will measure the effect of moving from website takedowns to payment and supply disruption. According to iGaming Times, which analysed the Commission’s dashboard, it records cease-and-desist notices to payment service providers separately: three in the second quarter of 2025/26, and none in any other quarter from April 2025 to September 2026. The next dashboard update will show whether the new focus produces measurable action against the businesses behind illegal sites.
Gambling in Great Britain is for adults aged 18 and over. Free, confidential support is available from the National Gambling Helpline on 0808 8020 133 in England and Scotland, or 0808 2819 265 in Wales, according to the Commission.
Sources
- https://www.gamblingcommission.gov.uk/news/article/commission-ramps-up-action-against-illegal-gambling-profits-and-assets
- https://www.gamblingcommission.gov.uk/news/article/new-survey-data-to-help-tackle-illegal-gambling-and-protect-consumers
- https://igamingbusiness.com/legal-compliance/illegal-betting-traffic-surges-in-britain-since-2021/
- https://igamingbusiness.com/gaming/can-big-tech-and-the-banks-starve-europes-black-market/
- https://sbcnews.co.uk/social-responsibility/2026/11/10/gambling-commission-black-market-warning/
- https://igaming-times.com/news/regulatory/gambling-commission-widens-illegal-market-fight-payments
- https://www.ordenacionjuego.es/novedades/dgoj-participa-sigma-world-roma-abordar-retos-lucha-contra-juego-ilegal-europa
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