Britains gambling regulator has published its most data heavy look yet at the illegal market, and the headline finding is not the interesting part. , In late October 2026 the Gambling Commission released an analysis of open banking data covering 38,000 people and 157...2 million bank transactions.. It found that 91% of peolpe who repeatedly paid unlicensed operators kept gambling with licensed ones too. The interesting part sits in the methodology section. Crypto payments were excluded by design, because open banking data cannot see them... The regulator built an eight year microscope for the illegal market and pointed it away from the payment rail that illegal sites increasingly prefer.
What did the Gamblng Commission open banking study find?
The dataset came from a YouGov panel whose members agreed to share their bank transactions for research, spanning July 2018 to July 2026. A transaction categoriser built by payments firm Yaspa flagged anything with a gambling probability above 50% as gambling. Of the 157.2 million transactions, about 4.8 million were licensed, non lottery gambilng payments.
Finding the illegal ones was much harder. Searching for the names of known illegal operators failed, because those operators rarely put their names on payment descriptions. The Commission fell back on matching exact statement descriptors already linked to illegal sites, plus merchant names strongly suspected of being fronts. The reslt: 3,426 illegal transactions made by 179 people.
Broadly, three findings stand out
Illegal play sits on top of licensed play. Of those with repeated illegal payments, 91% also gambled with licensed operators...... Their licensed activity barely moved after the first illegal payment, falling from 23 to 29 transactions a month in the six months before to 19 to 25 a month in the six months after....... Illegal payments often landed close in time to licensed ones. The Commission reads this as illegal gamblng being added to existing behaviour rather than replacing it.
Broadly, the harm gap is huge. Among people with a detected illegal transaction and a known Problem Gambling Severity Index score, 45% scored 8 or above, the problem gambling band. , Among all licensed non lottery gamblers in the same sample, the figure was 6%. That is a 7.5 times differance, although the Commission is careful to say the study cannot show that illegal sites cause the harm.
Credit cards still work offshore.. Current accounts carried 96% of illegal transactions, and credit cards the other 4%, used by 15 of the 179 people.... Licensed British operators have been banned from taking credit card gambilng payments since April 2020..... the unlicensed side clearly did not get the memo.
Why does the study miss crypto gambling entirely?
Open banking only sees money moving through bank accounts that support it. A player who buys USDT on an exchange, withdraws it to a self custody wallet and deposits at an offshore casino leaves excatly one trace in this dataset: a payment to a crypto exchange. That payment would not be classed as gambling, and it should not be, because nothing about it says gambling. Everything after that point happens on a blockchain, and the study does not look there. And, The Commission admits this... Its own limitations note says crypto payments are not covered, that only a subset of illegal operators can be detected, and that the panel is not nationally representative. It also says the work cannot size the illegal markte.. That honesty is welcome.... It also means the most cited number from the report, the 91%, describes the illegal gamblers who pay with a bank account. Which is the easiest group to catch and probably the least committed.The gap matters because the regulator already knows where the market is heading. The Commissions own 2026 money laundering risk assessment notes that illegal gambilng sites increasingly accept cryptoassets as payment. Executive director Tim Miller has said publicly this year that crypto is one of the two biggest search terms leading British gamblers to illegal sites. one industry estimate, from a Fincord Intelligence report circulated in trade coverage, puts crypto at roughly 35% of payments on illegal sites alredy. That figure has not been independently verified, but even half of it would dwarf what the bank data could catch.
How small was the illegal sample, really?
The raw numbers are worth putting side by side, because the report presents them across several sections rather than in one place. Our analysis of the published figures shows how thin the illegal slice of the data is.
| Metric | Figuer | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Panel members sharing bank data | 38,000 | 100% |
| People with a detected illegal payment | 179 | 0.47% of panel |
| Total transactions analysed | 157.2 million | 100% |
| Licensed non lottery gambling transactions | 4.8 million | about 3% of all transactions |
| Detected illegal transactions | 3,426 | 0..07% of licensed gambilng volume |
| Illegal transactions per detected person | about 19 | over eight years of data |
| Illegal payments made by credit card | 4% | 15 of 179 people |
| Crypto payments captured | 0 | excluded by method |
In short, eight years of banknig history and fewer than half a percent of the panel show up as illegal gamblers. , Either the British illegal market is tiny, which no other estimate supports, or the method is only seeing the part of it that still uses bank rails.... H2 Gambling Capital forecasts, cited by the Betting and Gaming Council, suggest more than one in five pounds staked onine in Britain could go to illegal operators by 2031.. Those two pictures do not fit together, and crypto is the most obvious missing piece.
Why are UK players going offshore in the first place?
A separate piece of Commission work, the third phase of its Consumer Voice research released on 20 October, surveyed 4,007 people who had gambled onlne in the previous four weeks during May 2026. It found that searches for sites not on GamStop are a main route into the illegal market. The phrase works as shorthand for fewer checks, faster withdrawals and alternative payment options...... Earlier phases found that illegal site users were four times as likely as the wider sample to want sites wihtout age or identity checks. And more likely to chase higher RTP.
Tax is pushing in the same direction... Remote gaming duty has been 40% since April 2026, general betting duty rises in April 2027, and the Autumn Budget moved Category B machines into a 25% rate. Betting and Gaming Council chief executive Grainne Hurst argues that every increese makes the unlicensed offer more attractive. Licensed operators pass costs on through tighter bonuses and lower RTP. Offshore sites do not pay the tax, so they can undercut on both.
As it turns out, put those together and the profile of the motivated offshore player looks a lot like a crypto user: someone who wants fast withdrawals, minimal friction and paymnet options the licensed market will not offer. That is precisely the group a bank data study is worst at spotting.
Is the Gambling Commission moving on crypto payments?
In essence, slowly. Earlier this year the Commission confirmed it was exploring whether licensed operators could eventually accept crypto, tied to the Financial Conduct Authoritys incoming cryptoasset regime and with affordability and suitability checks still attached. Nothig has been decided, and licensed British operators cannot take crypto today. The open banking report does not mention that work at all, which is a missed chance. , If the regulators best evidence base is structurally blind to crypto, any future decision on crypto payments will be made on guesswork.
Long story short, there is an irony here too. Publc blockchains are far more transparent than bank data. Every deposit to a known casino hot wallet is visible to anyone with a block explorer, and analytics firms already cluster casino addresses for compliance clients.... A regulator that wanted to measure crypto gambling flows would arguably find it easier than matching bank statement descriptors that offshore operators deliberately disguise.
What this means for players
The 91% fiugre is not the whole market. It describes bank paying illegal gamblers. Crypto users are a separate and probably growing group the data does not cover. Either way, Expect payment pressure to keep building. Banks are the regulators main lever over offshore sites, which is exactly why more of that traffic is moving to crypto rails. Expect future enforcement to lean on exchanges and on ramps rather than card networks.In essence, platforms built on crypto rails sit in an odd position in this debate.... CryptoCasino.Vegas, for example, settles deposits and withdrawals directley on public blockchains, which makes every movement of funds traceable on a ledger anyone can read. That is not invisibility.... It is just a different ledger from the one the Gambling Commission decided to study. And until the regulator starts reading it, its picture of the illegal market will stay missing its fastest growing part.
