UK LEGAL
Measuring the black market
Northridge Law’s Melanie Ellis looks at what’s being done to keep tabs on potential black-market operations.
ccording to a recent report commissioned by the Betting and Gaming Council, unlicensed (or ‘black market’) gambling in Great Britain takes at least £2.7bn and possibly up to £4.3bn of revenue from legitimate operators each year. Since point of consumption legislation was introduced in 2014, it has been a requirement for any gambling operator accepting play from a customer located in Great Britain to hold a licence from the Gambling Commission, although it is not an offence for an individual to gamble with an unlicensed operator. It is clear that, in both online and offline contexts, it is not difficult for customers to give their business to operators who do not hold the required licences. In some cases, this may be a deliberate use of an unlicensed operator, for example to avoid a GAMSTOP self- exclusion, although the BGC’s report found that in more than half of cases the customer was simply unaware.
A 22 NOVEMBER 2024
The range of new regulatory measures proposed by the previous Government’s White Paper include many that have the potential to encourage customers to seek out operators not subject to such stringent requirements. It is vital that the use of black-market operators can be monitored, so any unwanted effects of these new measures can be monitored. While it may be difficult to attribute any increase in the use of unlicensed sites to one specific regulatory measure, with multiple changes being implemented within a relatively short timeframe, a noted significant increase should at least prompt further research and consideration.
Until now, the Gambling Commission has had no official way of tracking the impact of the black market. Following the publication of the BGC report, the regulator announced improvements to its own approach to collecting evidence on the scale of unlicensed gambling in Great Britain. It is
creating its own estimates, although so far this is based on online slots GGY only and notably is not able to capture play from customers accessing the sites using a VPN. No data from this research has yet been published, but the Commission says it will be at some point in 2025.
The Commission has also created a dashboard of unlicensed operators, ranked by their current usage by British consumers, which will be used by enforcement teams to help them prioritise and target their disruption activity. In general, enforcement efforts appear to have ramped up in recent years. In a recent blog post, Commission CEO Andrew Rhodes highlighted particular successes in the regulator’s collaborations with Google, which has removed 50,000 referred urls since the start of April this year, representing a tenfold increase on url takedowns in the whole of the 2023-34 financial year.
Understanding consumers’ reasons for
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