The UK Gambling Commission sharply increased its action against illegal online gambling in the six months to September, issuing 1,005 cease-and-desist notices and reporting more than 7.8 million URLs to search engines. Search engines removed about 3.04 million of those addresses, while 1,668 websites were taken down or otherwise disrupted.
The figures, reported by Casino.com after the regulator’s CEO briefing on Nov. 5, exceeded several full-year totals from 2025-26. The Commission had issued 741 cease-and-desist notices in the previous financial year, recorded 266,667 URL removals and disrupted 1,134 websites.
The regulator also referred 2,201 websites to search engines for delisting between April and September, compared with 1,068 during the preceding financial year. The URL figures concern web addresses rather than a count of individual gambling operators or sites, and search-result removal chiefly makes sites harder to find rather than preventing access outright.
Acting Chief Executive Sarah Gardner said the Commission had begun scaling its capacity after receiving the first £7 million from a £26 million, three-year government commitment to tackle illegal gambling. As we reported last month, the funding was intended to expand website disruption, payment blocking and international cooperation.
The Commission said a minister-led task force had been established and that it had challenged social-media companies over advertising by illegal gambling operators. Its statutory remit includes preventing gambling from being a source of, or associated with, crime under the Gambling Act 2005; its 2024-27 strategy seeks to make illegal online gambling difficult to offer at scale in Great Britain.
New survey findings published alongside the briefing put use of illegal gambling websites at 1% of Great Britain respondents over the previous 12 months. The rate rose to 4% among online gamblers when National Lottery participants were excluded.
The Commission described the results as its most complete picture so far of illegal-market use, while saying overall engagement appeared low and stable. It said people who used illegal sites were more likely to experience gambling harm.
The survey forms part of the Gambling Survey for Great Britain and feeds an updated Illegal Gambling Data Dashboard. The regulator said the data would establish a baseline to track engagement, target interventions and assess whether disruption activity is working.
Its research combines web monitoring, traffic and search data with enforcement information to follow the illegal-gambling supply chain. The Commission has reported a tenfold increase in disruption activity since April 2024, but said illegal operators have also responded by rotating domains, changing URL structures and embedding gambling content in otherwise unrelated websites.
The Commission’s website-identification tool uses automated Google searches and Similarweb traffic estimates to prioritise potential targets, with human operational review required before a report, enforcement action or takedown. In earlier disruption analysis, geo-blocking and registrar blocks appeared more effective than search removals because they restrict access; across roughly 160 sites with traffic data, engagement fell by an average of 32% after intervention.
