Study: British Gamblers Are Not Turning Away From Legal Gambling in Favor of Illegal Options
The United Kingdom Gambling Commission (UKGC) has discovered that users of illegal gambling platforms often continue to play on licensed sites as well. In other words, illegal gambling more frequently supplements legal gambling rather than replacing it.
The UKGC arrived at this conclusion after analyzing anonymized data on banking transactions of UK residents. According to the regulator, this approach allows for direct observation of consumer behavior rather than making inferences based on indirect assessments, as is often the case in surveys-based research.
"We compared the average number of transactions with licensed operators before and after the first recorded payment to an illegal operator. It turned out that after this, the level of interaction with licensed operators did not significantly decrease," the UKGC study states.
At the same time, the UKGC found that among the clients of illegal platforms, people with signs of problem gambling were more common.
However, the UKGC urged caution in interpreting the results: the sample does not reflect the entire UK population, and some payments to illegal operators may have gone unnoticed.