The Gambling Commission has urged stakeholders to highlight companies failing to tackle the blight of the black market.
Speaking at the Ethical Gambling Forum, the UK regulator’s Executive Director, Tim Miller, said that the commission ‘will become increasingly vocal in drawing attention’ to companies failing to protect consumers from the black market and ‘I would encourage all of you to lend your voices to that cause’.
“We cannot allow inaction by others to undermine our efforts,” warned Miller. “Our ongoing work to tackle the illegal gambling market has shown that the increasing visibility and accessibility of illegal sites is yet another example of big tech being too reactive and only using their considerable resources for harm prevention when really pushed to.
“The future of that market will depend upon us all working together with a shared purpose to continue delivering an innovative and engaging consumer experience within a well-regulated environment that has fairness and safety at its heart.”
Miller’s words build on his previous criticism of social media platform Meta, which he said in January needed to do more to prevent illegal gambling advertisements appearing across its platforms.
They also come a week after research from the Marketing Intelligence firm WARC predicted that black market advertising spend will overtake the regulated sector by 2028.
The regulator was allocated £26m across three years by the government to tackle the black market in November’s Autumn budget, and Miller emphasised that the commission wants to ‘ramp up our action’ against the illegal market through cooperation with other regulators and law enforcement bodies.
Alongside the allocation of funds, the government has also set up an illegal gambling taskforce, designed to boost cross-agency collaboration between law enforcement and big tech companies like Google, Meta and Visa.
Providing an update on the task force, Miller said he was pleased with its early progress but cautioned that it must generate tangible results, rather than ‘become a talking shop’.
Mythbusting financial risk assessments
Also high on the agenda for Miller was the Gambling Commission’s defence of the potential implementation of financial risk assessments amid criticism from corners of the gambling industry.
He echoed a blog post published by the Gambling Commission earlier this month, which described the commentary around the checks as ‘ill-informed or inaccurate’, and reiterated that the assessments – which were one of the key recommendations made by the 2023 Gambling White Paper – are designed to eliminate the need for operators to require financial documents from players.
Opponents of the assessments have questioned their frictionless nature, which was a key mandate of their implementation within the white paper, and accused them of being ‘affordability checks’ under a different name.
“Let me be clear, the proposed thresholds for an assessment are not limits or caps on customer spend,” said Miller. “The checks we have been piloting will not even attempt to make an assessment of what each customer can afford to gamble.”
According to the UK regulator, its pilot study of the assessments found that just one in 1000 customers deemed to meet current thresholds for an assessment will not be able to undertake them in a frictionless manner – surpassing the estimates laid out in the white paper.
Miller emphasised that there are no ‘predetermined next steps’ regarding the implementation of financial risk assessments, and the Gambling Commission will now take its recommendations to its Board for further inspection before future plans are laid out.
He concluded: “If the decision is made to introduce these assessments, we will work closely with DCMS, the industry and credit reference agencies to establish an implementation group that will jointly develop the details of a sensible implementation plan and timetable.
“It will also help shape the guidance to operators to ensure that they take a proportionate approach to interacting with customers where financial risk is identified.”
