UK trade body fends off illegal gambling attacks

The UK’s Betting and Gaming Council (BGC) has sternly defended its members amid a report accusing them of black market activity.

Illegal gambling has become one of the biggest talking points in conversations around UK betting. The government has committed funds and a task force to clamp down on the black market, while the licensed industry continues to make noise about illegal competition.

During a House of Lords committee hearing held today, 17 June, a campaign group made allegations against a number of game supplier members of the BGC relating to unlicensed websites Donbet and Mystake.

SBC News managed to create an account on both sites but none of the games from the suppliers listed in the report were accessible, therefore we were not able to substantiate these claims.

Grainne Hurst, Chief Executive Officer of the BGC, commented: “I would like to make it crystal clear that any accusation that our members do not take black market activity seriously… is completely false.

“We have spoken to all of the members involved who have categorically denied that they are supplying the black market, and I think what this actually shows – although I haven’t seen the evidence despite regularly asking for the report until it was published this morning – is the sophistication of the criminality of the illegal market in effectively cloning our BGC members’ games, making them look legitimate and stealing their IP.”

It is not a secret that the source code of popular games can be stolen to reverse engineer them in full. Copying the logo of a company and slapping it on that bootleg product in complete disregard of all copyrights then becomes the easy part.

“I think that is at the crux of this issue,” Hurst added. Still, the repercussions for an offender who does get proven guilty remain serious. 

“If any member of the BGC was obviously found to be supplying the black market, not only would they not be eligible for BGC membership, but they would also lose their Gambling Commission licence.”

The report also lashed out at the Gambling Commission for “failing to geoblock” the domains. Important to highlight here is that surprisingly, unlike other regulators in Europe the Commission still does not have domain blocking powers. 

However, this is due to change in the coming months, with the gambling authority finally able to ask for court orders to be issued against specific domains. More on that was shared by Tim Miller, Executive Director of Research and Policy at the Commission, during his recent appearance at the iGaming Daily Podcast.