Britain's Gambling Commission has established a new baseline for measuring public use of unlicensed gambling websites. Its first Illegal Gambling Index estimates that 1% of survey respondents engaged with an illegal site during the previous 12 months.
The regulator's release separates that annual figure into 0.6% who showed engagement in the latest four weeks and another 0.4% whose activity fell earlier in the year. Most respondents, 94.4%, displayed no sign of using an illegal operator.
The rate was higher among people who had gambled online. Within that group, 2.5% engaged during the latest four weeks and 1.5% did so earlier in the 12-month period. Men and younger adults were more likely to appear in the illegal-site segment, although the timing differed across age bands.
The Commission said the new index is intended as a repeatable benchmark rather than a complete estimate of illegal-market spending. Future survey waves will be compared with web-traffic measures and enforcement intelligence to track changes and assess disruption work.
