A new study from the British Gaming Council (BGC)estimates that 1.5 million British citizens are still gambling on black market sites. Conducted by Frontier Economics on behalf of the BGC and titled “The size and economic costs of black market gambling in Great Britain“ the report estimates that those 1.5 million outlaw Brits are spending as much as £4.5 billion ($5.7 billion USD) each year with unlicensed operators.
Offshore gambling is a big problem in almost every country, but rarely does it get as close an examination as the BGC has provided in this latest report. The last deep dive into offshore gambling and its impact was, arguably, the (not-so-recent) Government white paper on gambling reform.
Beside depriving players of the protections provided by a regulated gaming site, black market sites also rob governments of desperately needed tax revenue. According to the BGC, offshore operators deprive British taxpayers of as much as £335 million ($471 million USD) in revenue every five years. That’s the equivalent of about 1,500 teacher salaries over that same amount of time.
“This shocking report exposes the unnerving true scale of the growing, unsafe, unregulated gambling black market. From online gaming, to betting on sports like horse racing, millions of customers are being driven into the arms of pernicious black market operators. These people don’t care about player safety, don’t want to pay their fair share to support sport and don’t pay a penny in tax,” Betting and Gaming Council CEO Grainne Hurst said while describing the impact of offshore gambling in a recent press release.
What impact, if any, the report will have on British gambling regulators remains to be seen. But either way, offshore operators represent a genuine threat to regulated gaming and will likely remain the target of the regulated industry’s ire for the foreseeable future.