UK Gambling Commission “tracking 1,000 illegal operators” marked for shutdown

The regulator’s CEO says it’s reported nearly 100,000 URLs to search providers this year.

UK.- The British Gambling Commission’s CEO Andrew Rhodes has highlighted the regulator’s enforcement action against unlicensed gambling in a speech to the International Association of Gaming Regulators (IAGR) in Toronto. He said the commission was measuring the impact of its work to disrupt online traffic to unlicensed sites through collaboration with search engines. 

Rhodes said the regulator had reported “nearly 100,000” URLs to search providers this year, taking the total number of sites it has reported close to 200,000.

He said: “we can measure the impact we’ve had and we’re tracking over 1,000 illegal operators as we try to shut them down: what effect we’re having on their traffic. And what we can see is if we can remove things from search results, we make it harder to find, so we slow them down.”

He said there had been less impact on Facebook, but that the platform had been good at removing illegal lotteries – “our biggest problem on there”.

See also: British Gambling Commission adapts to illegal market’s “unusual advertising methods”

He added: “Our focus in GB has been all about disrupting illegal gambling upstream. Yes, we closed down individual websites, but what we’re most interested in is making them harder to find and harder to operate. We’ve also focused a lot on B2B game suppliers as well and trying to choke off the content that goes into the illegal market. Thus making it a lot less attractive.

Withdrawal times in the spotlight

Rhodes also commented on the issue of withdrawal times from gambling accounts. With the analogy of ordering a component for international shipping, he said customers now expect to know exactly when their withdrawal will arrive, and that ideally it should be immediate.

He said: “I bought a part for my watch a couple of months ago and I had to get the part online. The only place I could get it was on eBay, in Italy. And what was fascinating was I ordered this part on a Tuesday morning and I was told all the way through that my part had been packed, that it had been dispatched. I was told that DHL now had it at an airport and with flight radar, I could see the actual plane it was on and it was tracked in every different point. When it was being delivered to me, I knew how far away it was and it had arrived.

“Everything we order now, we know exactly where it is when it’s going to arrive, how long it’s going to be. The name of the person bringing it even. And consumers expect that with everything. So once they ask for a withdrawal of money from a gambling operator, they expect it to be instantaneous. They want to know when it’s happening, and that wasn’t the case for their experience.”

He said that the regulator’s data for June to September 2024 showed there were 44.2 million withdrawals from accounts with GB-licensed operators. While 96.3 per cent were cleared automatically, 3.5 per cent took 34 hours and 0.1 per cent took longer. He said the regulator was keen to gain an understanding of why there was a delay in this small proportion of cases.