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Foto: Divulgação/ UKGC

The United Kingdom Gambling Commission (UKGC) is developing a comprehensive study into the irregular betting market in the country. Thus, it aims to improve the monitoring of illegal gaming operations.

The Commission will release the first version of this study in 2025. The UKGC believes that by better understanding why and how consumers access unlicensed betting sites, it will be able to identify ways to use data to detect these sites. Furthermore, you will be able to estimate the use of these sites by British consumers.

Gross income and research challenges

Regulators in the Netherlands and Sweden face similar challenges in their research. Furthermore, they highlight that consumption in the irregular market distorts plumbing data.

This distortion makes it difficult to understand consumer habits and market trends. Thus, complicating the formulation of effective strategies to regulate the betting sector.

They calculated the average spend by players on illegal sites, collecting spending data from 139,152 online betting accounts from seven leading UK operators.

Between July 2018 and June 2019, the average estimated GGY per minute for online slots was £0.32. However, the current methodology does not consider consumers who spend a lot on other betting activities, such as sports betting.

Search traffic data is collected by monitoring specific terms with Google Trends and the Similarweb platform. First, the top five Google page results are collected for each search term.

Then affiliate sites and articles are flagged. Unlicensed betting sites are then extracted from these affiliates and checked for accessibility to UK consumers. In addition, web traffic data and the average length of visits for each unlicensed website are collected.

Unlicensed betting market in the UK

The UK Gambling Commission stated that “there is anecdotal evidence from our Consumer Voice research into unlicensed betting that people’s spending habits are different on unlicensed sites compared to licensed sites”.

In the future, the Commission intends to explore other channels that connect players to the irregular market, including social media and encrypted messaging applications such as WhatsApp and Telegram.

Additionally, streaming platforms like Twitch and Kick will also be scrutinized for the role they play in driving traffic to unlicensed sites. Licensed operators are being encouraged to share relevant data to help improve the Commission’s methodology or suggest different detection methods.

“Addressing the unlicensed market is a shared goal, and we encourage any feedback on ways to improve our methodology,” the commission’s statement reads.