UKGC Tracks Illegal Gambling Payment Patterns

The UK Gambling Commission has used anonymised bank data to examine activity involving licensed and unlicensed gambling operators. In its non-representative sample, 91% of people with repeated detected unlicensed transactions also used licensed operators. The Gambling Commission analysed a YouGov open banking dataset covering 38,000 consenting individuals from July 2018 to July 2026. It identified 3,426 unique transactions linked to known or suspected illegal gambling operators, involving 179 people. The regulator said its first search for known operator names in transaction descriptions found no matches. It then matched known payment descriptions and merchant names associated with suspected illegal operators.