Monday, 3 February 2025

ICE: Gambling Commission reveals ten-fold increase in illegal URL takedowns

Great Britain’s Gambling Commission has assisted in the takedown of 264 illegal gambling websites in the financial year to date, an increase of more than ten-fold from the previous year.

United Kingdom

Commission chief executive Andrew Rhodes made the revelation during a speech on 21st January at the ICE World Regulatory Briefing. Rhodes discussed the state of the British gambling market and offered insight into the regulator’s recent activities.

He was keen to highlight the Commission’s ongoing focus on and commitment to combating illegal gambling. On this, Rhodes revealed several statistics from the current financial year to demonstrate, with a focus on the online market.

This, Rhodes said, includes referring over 102,000 URLs to Google in refence to unlicensed online activity in Britain. Of this total, 64,000 sites have been removed by the search engine giant, while 264 websites have been taken down. The latter figure dwarves the total that were taken down in the previous financial year.

Rhodes also set out details of how the Commission itself is addressing illegal gambling. He said in the financial year to date, the regulator has issued over 770 cease and desist and disruption notices. This includes 262 cease-and-desists to operators and 205 to advertisers.

While pleased with this progress, Rhodes said there is “more to do” to tackle illegal activity. Rhodes repeated calls from the Commission for licensed operators to support the regulator with its efforts.

This week, the regulator issued a warning notice after flagging incidents of licensed games being used by illegal operators. It once again called on licensees to improve monitoring of business relationships to ensure partners are not facilitating illegal gambling.

Last November, he urged licensees to conduct due diligence on partners to ensure they are not engaged in illegal activity. Rhodes last week said the sector seemingly misunderstood his comments and that he could not understand why licensees would want to work with those supporting illegal competitors.

While concerns over illegal activities remain, Rhodes is upbeat about the regulated market in Britain. He referenced the most recent gross gambling yield (GGY) figures which, published in October, revealed record results.

GGY in Q3 – covering the three months to the end of September – hit £1.32 billion (€1.56 billion/$1.63 billion). This was largely driven by a 16% uptick in online slots activity among UK gamblers, with this reaching a record high.

Source: igamingbusiness.com





Author: Editor

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