Illegal Gambling Tracking Harder as VPN Use Rises
The Gambling Commission has said it is becoming harder to track illegal online gambling in Great Britain because higher VPN use is obscuring parts of the web traffic it relies on to understand the market. In an update posted on 21 April, Tim Livesley, head of the regulator’s Data Innovation Hub, said the latest trendline now runs to February 2026, but should still be treated as an indicator of direction rather than a definitive measure of the market’s size.
Trendline extended, but no clear structural rise
According to the Commission, the updated 21-month series continues to show fluctuations in engagement with illegal gambling websites, measured through estimated total minutes spent on site. However, the regulator said the pattern does not point to a consistent or sustained increase over the full period. A rise seen in autumn 2024 was not repeated in the same period of 2025, which the Commission said weakens the case for a clear seasonal pattern and suggests a more volatile picture instead.
That cautious framing matters. The Commission has already said that web traffic estimates carry margins of error and cannot capture every route into illegal gambling. In its latest update, it repeated that no single dataset should be treated as definitive on a market as fragmented as this one. For the regulator, the value of the data is in spotting changes in trend, testing assumptions and improving disruption work, rather than producing a precise headline number for the size of the black market.
Online Safety changes complicate the picture
The main new complication is VPN use. The Commission said it had already applied a 30% uplift to account for traffic hidden by VPNs, but now believes a larger share of traffic may have disappeared from view after July 2025. That timing matters because child-safety duties under the Online Safety Act took effect on 25 July 2025, and Ofcom’s own reporting shows VPN usage in the UK more than doubled after highly effective age assurance became mandatory, rising from about 650,000 daily users before 25 July to a peak of more than 1.4 million in mid-August before easing to around 900,000 in November.
Using Ofcom and Similarweb data, the Commission has now built two updated VPN scenarios into its modelling. The result is a wider confidence interval from mid-2025 onwards, meaning the trendline becomes less certain at precisely the point when regulators are trying to judge whether illegal gambling activity is growing, flat, or simply moving out of sight. That does not mean the market has suddenly surged, but it does mean the margin for error is now larger.
Enforcement remains a live priority
The update also lands against a backdrop of broader enforcement work. In its disruption report, last updated in March, the Commission said that since April 2024 its illegal markets team had issued 3,140 cease-and-desist and disruption notices, referred 447,778 URLs to Google and Bing, and secured the removal of 287,961 URLs. Looking at 160 disrupted websites, it said engagement fell by an average of 32% in the three months after action was taken.
For UK operators and policymakers, the message is mixed. The latest figures do not support a simple narrative of unchecked illegal-market growth, but they do show that measurement itself is getting harder. The Commission says illegal gambling remains a priority and that further updates on both research and enforcement will follow later this year. For now, the regulator’s position is that the trend data still has value, but only when read with caution and alongside wider evidence.
