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.
Commission chief executive Andrew Rhodes made the revelation during a speech yesterday (21 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.
“Our aim is to prevent the illegal market from operating at scale in Great Britain,” he said. “A significant part of our strategy in doing that is to target our efforts as far upstream as we can – at the level of hosts, payment providers, software providers, search engines and others.
“We have spent the last two years in particular not just targeting illegal activity but also building our own resources, skills and capabilities. There is more to do of course and that also is true of others in the sector.”
Commission chief urges more effort from licensees
On this point, 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 it is not the job of licensed operators to take action against illegal operators, I have firmly encouraged everyone to ensure they have undertaken due diligence regarding their own activities and those of any suppliers they rely on,” he said in yesterday’s speech.
“If the Commission detects illegal activity in any operator – B2C or B2B – we may well immediately suspend their licence. In any event, they face the very real prospect of having their GB licence revoked, which means anything they are supplying to anyone else in Britain will cease immediately.”
Rhodes sees bright future for gambling in Britain
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.
