British regulator says VPNs making it more difficult to track illegal gambling
The Gambling Commission has recognised that a larger proportion of unlicensed gambling traffic may be hidden.
UK.- The British Gambling Commission has warned that an increased use of virtual private networks (VPNs) is making it more difficult to gain a picture of the size of the gambling black market. In the regulator’s latest update on trends and data approach, Tim Livesley, the head of its Data Innovation Hub notes that the introduction of the Online Safety Bill last year caused many consumers to circumvent restrictions on online activity.
He says the Gambling Commission had already “factored an uplift of 30 per cent” into its trendline to reflect black market traffic hidden by VPNs. However, the regulator recognises that since July 2025 “a larger proportion of web traffic could be hidden.”
The Gambling Commission views web traffic estimates as more effective at providing insights on trends rather than absolute volumes of traffic as they are subject to margins of error. It cautions against treating any single data source as definitive and is developing its approach with additional data points, but it still sees web traffic to unlicensed gambling websites as a useful indicator of trends.
Data from the past two years showed a continuation of fluctuating trends in estimated engagement with unlicensed sites (time on site) but did not appear to fit with a seasonal pattern. A rise in the autumn of 2024 was not mirrored by a similar increase in the same period of 2025. Moreover, the overall trendline does not appear to show a consistent or sustained growth in consumer engagement over the 21 months of data.
The Gambling Commission explored further by obtaining data on VPN usage from the communications authority Ofcom and the digital data company Similarweb. The Ofcom data showed a sharp increase in VPN usage in July 2025, followed by a steady decline to a level around 40 per cent above previous levels. Similarweb data mirrored this, but with a less significant initial spike.
The figure below provides an updated version of the engagement trendline with the Gambling Commission’s VPN usage assumptions adjusted in line with these scenarios. The data for July is associated with a larger confidence interval, which settles back towards a more consistent position after this date.
Livesley said: “We continue to work on improvements to our methodology and are seeking input from other international regulators and licensed operators to help verify and improve existing data sources and to identify additional datasets which can be used to improve understanding of the illegal market. We are also collecting more data on consumer engagement through the Gambling Survey for Great Britain (GSGB) and generating more insight through our Consumer Voice research programme.
“We will be publishing further updates on our research, statistics and data work throughout the year. The Commission continues to treat illegal gambling as a priority and we will also be providing further updates on how we are expanding our disruption and enforcement activity and how we are measuring the impact of this investment.”
