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The UK Gambling Commission published a new open-banking study on 28 October 2026 examining payments believed to involve illegal gambling businesses. Its most useful lesson is about evidence: a bank-transaction pattern can illuminate suspected activity, but it does not automatically tell us the size of the unlicensed market or prove that a particular casino is licensed.
What the researchers actually examined
The Commission analysed anonymised, consent-based banking records linked to survey responses for about 38,000 people, covering July 2018 to July 2026. The underlying YouGov panel was not designed as a nationally representative sample. A research team used information from known operator payments, merchant descriptors and a classification approach to identify relevant transactions.
An initial search looking for illegal operators' names in transaction descriptions was unsuccessful. A more targeted matching exercise identified 821 transactions believed to involve illegal operators. A subsequent merchant-name exercise identified another 2,628 matches, with 23 transactions overlapping the previous set. Once overlaps were removed, the two methods identified 3,426 distinct suspected transactions, made by 179 individuals in the sampled data.
These are suspected payments identified through a defined method, not 3,426 different gamblers, confirmed criminal offences or the total number of illegal transactions in Great Britain. The wider dataset also contained roughly 4.8 million transactions with licensed non-lottery gambling businesses, but comparing the two counts as a market-share estimate would be misleading: the detection methods have different coverage.
What the payment types suggest — and what they do not
Of the identified transactions, 3,288 (96%) were recorded through current accounts and 138 (4%) through credit-card accounts. Those figures describe the transactions the researchers could find; they do not establish how all unlicensed gambling businesses take payments. Cryptocurrency transfers and payment routes outside the available open-banking records were not captured.
This matters for anyone reading a bank statement after a disputed casino payment. A merchant descriptor may be unfamiliar or incomplete, and a payment appearing in an ordinary bank account does not by itself confirm that the destination is a UK-licensed operator. Likewise, an unusual descriptor does not alone prove that a business is illegal.
For practical context about how legitimate processing stages can appear to customers, see our separate guide to casino payments marked pending or processing.
Gambling harm findings need careful interpretation
Among users with repeated detected unlicensed payments, the Commission found that 91% also transacted with licensed operators. The detected illegal activity often appeared alongside existing legal gambling rather than replacing it.
For the subset with Problem Gambling Severity Index (PGSI) information, 45% of those with a detected unlicensed transaction had a score of 8 or more, compared with 6% of a licensed non-lottery gambling comparison group within the same dataset. This is an important association, but the research cannot establish that gambling with an unlicensed operator caused those harms. It also cannot be projected to the entire British population.
Four limitations before quoting the headline number
Sampling: participants consented to share banking records for research and were not a representative sample of UK adults.
Coverage: the analysis missed some financial institutions, cryptocurrency transfers and operators whose payment descriptors were not already known.
Identification: the study could identify transactions resembling known illegal-operator payment references; it was not a tool for discovering entirely unknown unlicensed casinos.
Causation: an association between detected payments and higher PGSI scores is not proof of a causal relationship.
For these reasons, the Commission explicitly says its findings cannot be used to estimate the overall size of the illegal gambling market.
What readers in Great Britain can verify
Before trusting an online gambling site, check its operating business and domain against the UK Gambling Commission's official public register. Read the licence status and make sure the registered domain and business match the service you intend to use. The register is the relevant source for UK licensing; an operator's own logo or marketing statement is not enough.
If you are trying to reconcile a delayed or rejected casino withdrawal, document the dates, amounts and support responses rather than assuming the cause from a bank descriptor. Our guide to rejected casino withdrawals addresses that distinct consumer problem.
Editorial note: This is a review of published regulatory research, not hands-on testing of a casino, an estimate of illegal-market share or a recommendation to gamble. No unlicensed operator is promoted.
Primary sources
We check licensing, terms, payments, and available player-protection tools. Commercial relationships do not change our evidence standards.
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