The UK Gambling Commission (UKGC) published a technical report on October 28 on the use of illegal gambling, based on banking transaction data. According to the findings, 91% of players who paid illegal operators also made payments to licensed sites.
The regulator took its own Open Banking dataset and found 3,426 payments to such operators, linked to 179 people. The aim of the work, as the UKGC describes it, was to isolate specific transfers between consumers and such companies in Britain and assess the harm and financial behaviour associated with them.
The UKGC believes the finding is consistent with an earlier Consumer Voice study: illegal gambling typically supplements legal play, so the regulator doubts it directly replaces it.
The regulator itself notes the limits of the sample: the group is small, and some transactions with these operators may have gone undetected. The UKGC calls the work a proof of concept for using financial data to study the illegal market, not an estimate of the whole market.
The report continues a series of UKGC publications on the illegal market. The previous one came out in April and covered the market's dynamics and methods for assessing them.
