Gambling is one of the oldest pastimes in the history of humankind.
Whether you’re having a flutter on the horses, building your weekly accumulator for the football at the weekend, or trying your luck at the casino, either in person or online, there’s plenty to sink your teeth into and hopefully win some money along the way.
Here in the UK, gambling is big business, and as a result, everybody wants their own slice of the pie. That, unfortunately, includes some less-reputable, more unsavoury characters.
Concerningly, recent statistics show that a number of UK-regulated bookmakers are now under threat due to black market gambling. With betting giants like Bet365, Ladbrokes, and BetVictor now raising the alarm, how bad is the problem?
Last year alone, experts estimated that as much as £2.7 billion was spent online on black market gambling sites. Some experts believe the true figure to be much higher. If things don’t change, that figure is only going to grow.
This begs the question: are our UK bookmakers under threat, and could UK-regulated bookmakers die off completely due to the rise in popularity of black-market gambling?
The growth of black market gambling in the UK
You certainly don’t need anybody to tell you just how much money is in gambling. In the last financial year ending March 2025, the Gross Gambling Yield (GGY) was worth a staggering £16.8 billion, up 7.3% from the previous year.
Of this, online gambling made up around 46% of the market, generating £7.8 billion.
Because the gambling industry is so lucrative, we’ve recently seen a sharp rise in the number of black-market gambling websites in operation across the UK.
In fact, alarmingly, experts have found that illegal bookmakers control as much as 9% of the market here in the United Kingdom.
According to Yield Sec, a popular gambling intelligence platform, in the first half of the year alone, illegal bookmakers earned as much as £379 million! This trend is particularly concerning for UK-regulated bookmakers, as it has more than tripled since 2022.
So, what’s driving these sudden increases in the number of illegal bookmakers operating in the UK? Well, like most things, their growth can be attributed to a number of different factors.
A report commissioned by the Campaign for Fairer Gambling (CFG) claimed that the rise in the number of operational UK black-market bookmakers was due to the targeting of under-18s and self-excluded punters.
Others, however, are far more dubious.
They believe that things such as affordability checks, wagering restrictions, stricter ID verifications, restricted customers, and tax on gaming free plays and bonuses have also driven customers away from UK-regulated bookmakers and into the criminal underbelly of black-market bookmakers instead.
Just to highlight how serious this issue is, between 2022 and 2024, legal online gambling grew by 19%. Now, to most, growth of nearly 20% over a two-year period is more than respectable.
Well, ordinarily that may be true, but during that same period, the illegal gambling sector grew by an eye-watering 345%!
How is the UKGC tackling black market gambling?
With such a sharp increase in the amount of operational illegal bookmakers in the UK, UK-regulated bookmakers are rightfully concerned about their futures.
Not only do they need assurances, they need affirmative action and the necessary steps being taken to tackle black-market gambling in the UK. So, what is being done?
To tackle the increase in UK black-market gambling, the UKGC (United Kingdom Gambling Commission) is taking a number of steps and measures to help secure the future of legal UK bookmakers.
To begin with, they are investing a great deal of time and money into developing specialist tools to support their Illegal Markets Team. The strategies being deployed include things such as:
- Secure website reviews
- Targeted test purchasing
- Working in collaboration with online search engines to reduce illegal gambling website’s visibility online
- Intelligence sharing
- Online disruption of illegal bookmakers
- Tackling illegal advertising on popular social media platforms
- Issuing cease and desist notices to illegal bookmaker and their affiliates
- Providing additional training to experts dedicated to dismantling illegal gambling organisations
By working in collaboration with prominent payment gateways, search engines, and social media sites, the disruption they’re causing does indeed appear to be working, though there is still a long way to go.
The risks and dangers of Black market gambling
As we can see above, organisations such as the UKGC are investing a lot of time, effort, and money into bringing down the UK gambling black-market, and rightly so.
Not only are UK-regulated bookmakers at risk of dying off due to the rise in popularity of black-market gambling, but users of illegal bookmakers are also at risk, for a variety of different reasons.
To begin with, the UK gambling black-market is unregulated, meaning that customers have no personal or financial assurances in place. Those who enter their personal data on these sites not only run the risk of data breaches, they also run the risks of becoming victims of fraud themselves.
Illegal bookmakers often target vulnerable and even underage customers, and again, as they are not regulated, there’s nothing stopping them from doing so, because they’re operating illegally anyway.
Black-market gambling websites lack responsible gambling tools, age verification, background checks, and secure payment systems.
Customers are therefore at risk of financial losses, data breaches, identity theft, fraud, and emotional distress if they use these sites.
By Jason White
Advertising feature with BetsSelect
