News Illegal gambling

Racegoers heading to a racecourse while a magnifying glass enlarges a few slipping into a back alley

A new report says visits to illegal betting sites have risen almost 20-fold since 2021. The industry has been warning all year that this would happen, and the Gambling Commission spent years saying that the threat was overplayed. But the number making headlines isn’t quite what it seems.

The claim Between January and July 2026, illegal betting sites got 19.4 visits from UK users for every 100 visits to licensed sites. In late 2021, it was about one.
Who’s behind it The International Federation of Horseracing Authorities, which looked at UK traffic to 301 betting websites that take bets on horse racing.
The catch It measures website visits, not people or money, and part of the rise comes from licensed sites losing traffic.

What the report found

The report was written by Douglas Robinson for the IFHA’s Council on Anti-Illegal Betting and Related Crime. It tracks UK traffic to 301 betting websites that are popular in the UK and offer horse racing. Of those, 74 are licensed and 227 are illegal. It covers August 2021 to July 2026, and it only counts visits from UK internet addresses.

The headline figure is a ratio. In late 2021, illegal sites got about one visit for every 100 visits to licensed sites. By 2025, that had reached 26.6. In the first seven months of 2026, it eased to 19.4, and that’s where the “19-fold” and “20 times” headlines come from.

Period Illegal visits per 100 licensed visits
August to December 2021 1.0
2022 1.2
2023 2.4
2024 8.3
2025 26.6
January to July 2026 19.4

Source: IFHA Council on Anti-Illegal Betting and Related Crime, November 2026.

The raw numbers are big too. Counted month by month and added up over the year, visits to the illegal sites went from about 1.8 million in 2022 to just over 25 million in 2025, a 14-fold rise. Over the same three years, visits to the licensed sites fell by 34%. People are also staying longer. The average visit to an illegal site went from 5 minutes 38 seconds in late 2024 to 7 minutes 25 seconds this year, while the average licensed visit dropped from 11 minutes 18 seconds to 9 minutes 57 seconds.

The report’s conclusion is that the Gambling Commission’s crackdown hasn’t worked yet. The Commission has sent more than 3,100 cease-and-desist and disruption notices since April 2024 and had almost 288,000 web addresses removed, but illegal traffic is still far above where it was in 2021.

The industry has been warning about this all year

None of this will surprise anyone who’s followed gambling news in 2026. Online casino tax went from 21% to 40% in April, and the duty on online sports betting goes from 15% to 25% next April, with horse racing left at 15%. The Betting and Gaming Council has said all year that higher taxes and tighter checks would push players towards sites with no UK licence. In July, it published a report from H2 Gambling Capital estimating that offshore operators took £685 million from UK players in 2025, more than three times the 2019 figure. Even after the Budget at the end of October stopped well short of a 40% rate on gaming machines, the BGC still reacted angrily.

Racing has been just as loud. The British Horseracing Authority’s chief executive, Brant Dunshea, pointed out that racing warned throughout the Gambling Act Review that new rules could drive customers to illegal sites. He says that this research “provides worrying evidence that those concerns are now being realised”.

Have the Gambling Commission’s chickens come home to roost?

Partly, yes. For years, the Commission played down the black market. In December 2021, its then chief executive, Andrew Rhodes, said that the black market was nowhere near a big enough threat to stop the regulator from taking strong action. In January 2023, his deputy, Sarah Gardner, warned that the regulator had little patience for black market risks being overplayed without evidence. She also said that she couldn’t accept the argument that the risk of players going offshore should hold back new rules for licensed operators.

Now look at the report’s figures for the years that followed. Illegal visits went from 2.4 for every 100 licensed visits in 2023 to 8.3 in 2024 and 26.6 in 2025. Whatever was behind that growth, it happened on the Commission’s watch, while it was still telling people that the problem wasn’t as big a deal as the industry claimed.

The tone has changed since. Sarah Gardner is now the Commission’s acting chief executive, and the regulator was given £26 million at last year’s Budget to fight illegal gambling. She says that between April and September 2026, the Commission reported more than 7.8 million web addresses to search engines and had more than three million removed, far more than the figures in the report. The government also set up an Illegal Gambling Taskforce in January, although Dunshea says that progress has been limited.

Why the figures aren’t as clear-cut as they seem

That’s the case for the prosecution. Now for the problems with the claim – and there are several.

Visits aren’t people, and they aren’t money The report says so itself: its measure doesn’t capture stakes, spending, customer accounts or punters moving between operators. One heavy-spending user visiting an illegal site every day counts for far more than a casual punter who has one bet a month. The Commission’s own survey figures, published at the start of November, found that 2.5% of people who gambled online had used an illegal site in the past four weeks. That’s a small minority of online gamblers, even if some of them visit those sites a lot.
Falling licensed traffic makes the ratio bigger Because the ratio compares illegal visits with licensed ones, it goes up whenever licensed visits go down, even if nothing changes on the illegal side. Licensed visits per month fell by about a fifth between late 2021 and this year. Per month, the illegal sites got about 16 times as many visits this year as they did in late 2021. That’s still a huge rise, but it isn’t 19 or 20 times.
Websites aren’t apps Plenty of regular customers of the big British bookies place their bets through an app, and app use doesn’t show up in website traffic. Illegal operators can’t get real-money betting apps into Apple’s or Google’s UK app stores, so their customers use a browser. Some of the licensed sites’ lost traffic could simply be people switching to the app.
It only looks at racing betting sites Every site in the sample takes bets on horse racing, so offshore casinos aren’t covered, and that’s where April’s tax rise hits hardest. It only counts UK internet addresses, so anyone using a VPN to reach an offshore site won’t appear, which is something the Commission is worried about too. Both of those could mean the real problem is bigger. On the other hand, the list of sites was drawn up recently. An illegal site that was busy in 2021 and has since vanished may not be in it, while many of today’s busiest offshore sites didn’t exist five years ago. That’s bound to make the early years look quieter than they really were.
One in five is really one in six The BHA’s press release says that around one in five visits by UK bettors now goes to an illegal operator. But 19.4 illegal visits for every 100 licensed visits means that illegal sites got about 16% of the visits in the sample, which is nearer one in six. And it’s one in six visits to the 301 sites in this sample, not to every betting site in the UK.
Racing has an interest in the answer The report comes from horse racing’s international federation and was promoted by the BHA, which has spent years campaigning against affordability checks and for racing’s share of betting money. That doesn’t make the data wrong or biased, but it’s worth remembering who chose what to measure.

So, is illegal gambling 20 times more popular than it was five years ago?

No, not in the way the report suggests. The “20 times” figure is a ratio of website visits to racing betting sites, boosted by falling licensed traffic and missing everyone who bets in an app. It doesn’t mean that 20 times as many people are betting illegally, and it says nothing about how much money is involved.

But I wouldn’t dismiss it, either. Even with all those caveats, visits to the illegal sites in this sample were 14 times higher in 2025 than in 2022, and people are spending longer on them. That’s a real shift, and it fits with what the BGC, racing and H2’s modelling have all been saying.

What the report doesn’t demonstrate is that this year’s tax rise caused it. Most of the growth came between 2023 and 2025, before April’s tax rise, and illegal traffic actually fell in the first seven months of 2026, at the same time as the Commission stepped up its takedowns. The report’s author is careful to say that this fall could be down to enforcement, or just as easily to changes in search results, sites moving to new addresses, the sporting calendar or ordinary ups and downs. So if the chickens have come home to roost, they came home in the years when the regulator was tightening the rules on licensed operators while telling everyone that the black market wasn’t much of a threat. The industry’s tax warnings may still turn out to be right, but this report isn’t the proof.

For players, the advice doesn’t change. Most people can’t easily tell an illegal betting ad from a licensed one, and offshore sites can look just like the real thing. But if something goes wrong, there’s no GAMSTOP, no independent complaints service and nobody in the UK who can make them pay you. Learn how to tell if you’re playing at a black market casino, and stay well away.