New study: Black market thrives where regulation is tightest

[The Buzz]

A new report published by the Betting and Gaming Council (BGC) and produced by PwC confirms that high taxes and restrictive regulations across European betting markets directly fuel black-market growth.

The study, Impact of the taxation and regulatory environment on European online betting and gaming markets, shows clear links between restrictive policy and operators moving offshore. This has resulted in major black-market shares in countries like France (57%), the Netherlands (37%), and Sweden (35%).

By contrast, Spain and Denmark, where tax rates are moderate and licensing systems open, maintain higher levels of onshore participation - with only around 11% of gambling taking place outside the regulated sector.

From BGC:

The report reveals that around 5 per cent of all online betting and gaming in the UK now takes place on unlicensed black-market websites. This is equivalent to hundreds of millions of pounds in untaxed, unregulated activity and marks a sharp rise from a previous estimate in 2021, when the black market was thought to account for only 3.3 per cent of total spend.

The report concludes that higher effective tax rates and tighter rules consistently lead to smaller regulated markets, while jurisdictions that liberalise and maintain balanced taxation enjoy stronger growth.

The findings also challenge the assumption that higher gambling duties increase public revenues. Between 2019 and 2024, countries with tax rates below 25% of gross gaming revenue saw annual growth in tax receipts of 13%, compared to 9% in higher-tax jurisdictions.

Read more here: https://www.gpwa.org/article/bgc-bla...ightest-261693

View the entire report here: https://bettingandgamingcouncil.com/...rkets_2025.pdf

[slotsdudes]

Well, in Sweden they made every licensee have one starting bonus avilable for a player just once, like that would make people play less. More likely to go to black market casinos and play unlicensed (outside SE) then to get better deals.

[Gilmors Svekis]

I totally agree with Slotsdudes, You take a way options from players to make casinos safer. If i remember correctly - in 2025 Sweden at one point was close to 15% in black-market. Regulators probably will step in, lets see how they tackle these problems, stricter rules wont help them for sure.

[Sherlock]

I would not say France is a great market for affiliates (where is a strong black market, there affiliates are fine).
UK is even worse. Few weeks ago I tried one of the "black" operators, so far I have whooping 2 FTD and i -2 GBP revenue.

This repeating of nonsense until it gets tru sadly does not work when someone has to make money on it.

About those expensive studies, that have to be done, only because someone should show, that he is writing something on computer... the most interesting thing would be a methodology how they get the data. (No way they get some relevant data about those "black markets".)

If you look to the sources (for UK for example), the sources of this useless and deceiving report, show only the government sources. So indeed it is one sided.

The only one that looks independent (Reducing online gambling black markets an analysis of international practices used to combat online gambling black markets), which was published by Entain [which has its own agenda on par with state], visibly contains pearls like:

For example, the French gambling regulator ANJ estimated that the black market forcasino products in France in 2022 was €748-1,500m. 3 Regulus believes this figure to be materiallyunderstated because of the importance of high value customers and the cumulative impact of otherdistortions such as price (see below). However, even if the official French figure is correct, it showsthat between 27% and 42% of the online market in France is channelled into the black market.

So even the "private" report is based on state data=propaganda, that takes numbers out of a33. They quote some made up numbers by ANJ and then they "believe" that they should be even more different. This is not a study, and PwC stamp does not make a study from this joke.

Yes, rising numbers of "studies" with nice charts, repeating the same narrative, it works. It is mirroring how the media propaganda works. It indeed can move the opinion, but it does not move the core reality. Which is that those markets are ****, because we affiliates, have the best data. Even I was wrong, thinking the black markets will be interesting. But they are not, and especially not in the Uk and in a lesser extent in France.

If you dig deeper, those "studies" do not have any real data. Just like most macroeconomic studies. They chain-quote one after another and deep inside is usually that "expert think", "it is estimated" or survey made on low amount of people with unknown methodology. But because there are lot of those papers made and they have always some important stamp or brand, it looks legit.

This is a ball that is exchanging the official gambling operators and state regulators that are now defacto one entity. They are just producing made up numbers to cement their power and destroy even the rest of free economic activity that they call "black".

I understand why GPWA is giving platinum membership to thieves; but why is here constantly reproduced nonsense, that goes against the interest of all affiliates and they are not even paid for it, is hard to understand. It is like when at symposium of cardiologists comes a doctor with a book of shiny hearts for little girls bought in toyshop and wants to discuss about it.

I am not calling for unbiased scientistic studies on forum. But this is 100% fake news. Because it is a lie and the lie has a reason to exist. To suppress the untaxed gambling, which by coincidence is the only gambling that brings money to affiliates.

Are you really so dumb?

[dannyx]

Nevertheless, tracking keywords related to offshore gambling shows that they are on the rise, both in the UK and France. So it seems that over time, these will once again be good markets for partners. France/ANJ is struggling more and more with the tightness of its system.

[Sherlock]

Yes France is rising. To rise from zero it is easy. But still is 10x, 20x worse than Germany. And once/if it raises more, which I doubt, they will just kill it.

They attack everything through banking. Ok, crypto solves this, but majority of people will not use crypto even in 20 years and exchanges will be forced to analyse and block those payments too.

The domain blocking is another vector. I do not see people using darkweb on large scale too.

The highest probability how France and UK can be resurrected is something like 3rd world war and total destruction. Yes, it is somewhat probable.

[dannyx]

I once heard from a manager that the French offshore market would be good, but even though they are willing to gamble offshore, they still want to pay with e-wallets rather than cryptocurrencies, and that this is the main problem in this market. I don't know how much truth there is in this, but I think there is something to it.

Website blocking is another unpleasant issue. Every now and then, I look at the registers of websites blocked in several countries. France was probably one of the leaders in blocking. Recently, a few months ago, I checked and their blocks were largely more porous than they used to be. However, I noticed that the Italians have started to block more efficiently (but this is just my observation, perhaps subjective). I think the use of VPNs is also important, and here I saw that Russia is one of the leaders in downloads, so despite the blocks, I sometimes think about trying this market, especially since Russian is not only Russia, but also several other countries.

I think Spain and Portugal are also places where players are interested in offshore gambling. Although, overall, Europe as a whole is definitely losing out to Asian countries in this respect. The economic outlook for Europe also seems worse than for Asia, and this may also have an impact on gambling.

[Sherlock]

Two notes.
I probably spent more time to persuade BTC bookies to give me ******* French banners than writing on this forum. Who made it? Vave only. With thousands of regs to one depositor.

Second: how you want to promote people on VPN even if they want to use it (they do not)? When the landing pages are blocked? Like download VPN, click here, click there, wait, register. How do you want to do it with gamblers who have even shorter attention span than normally dumb population?

[dannyx]

Thousands of registrations and one depositor, that's really poor. I guess it confirms the low use of crypto for gambling in France.

By VPN, I meant users who already have a VPN. Not promoting the installation of a VPN and then registering on the target site. I also think that wouldn't work.

I gave Russia as an example. After 2022, there were many millions of downloads of various VPN networks by Russians. So I assume that a person visiting the site may have a VPN enabled, so they can also visit the partner and target sites, even though both are blocked in Russia.

You mentioned that Germany is work better. Does this traffic convert on your German or English-language site?

[Sherlock]

The ratio is the same everywhere for crypto. I mention France, because in France or Netherlands there is nothing else to promote. But if somewhere is a normal banking it ALWAYS makes much better results for normal non-crypto traffic.

People who have VPN, in the first place, you want to block, because they are mostly robots who just destroy the site. If you do not want to block them, then I do not understand how you want to target them. For example you want to target people who already have VPN and for some unknown reason use VPN to browse internet. (People do not behave like this but ok.)

Now If someone let's say physically in the UK browse the internet with IP from Russia, because he is a masochist and wants lower speed and higher ping, he will get SERP results in Azbuka. OK, he probably does not like Russian alphabet, so he gets US VPN. He gets US SERP. Then he goes to target website and there he gets US ads that webmaster is promoting to US traffic unless he is totally dumb and throwing away most of the traffic because in 2025 he does not know what is geotarget. So he will promote totally different gambling sites to visitor that he will think he is from USA and not from UK.

Those are examples, but the logic I hope is clear.

[dannyx]

Russians search using Cyrillic characters, which means that search engines do not show them results from France, the UK, or the US. So, regardless of which VPN they use, most of their search results will be Russian-language websites, rather than English-language ones that are geotargeted to multiple regions. In addition, despite the VPN, the search engine often maintains a cache with the location. That is why I am mainly referring to Russia. For other locations with the same alphabet, it may be more difficult.


As for blocking, I am not in favor of it unless it is necessary due to technical issues, attacks, overloads, or legal reasons. FTD can even come from unusual countries.

[Sherlock]

Maybe I am special, but I am switching IPs all the time, not just VPN, but simply internet with roaming and I always get SERP from the country of IP. With VPN Google spits captcha on me all the time which is another reason why I am thinking that only masochists use VPN for everything they do. Normally people switch on VPN only for the action they need the VPN when we are talking about those country changing VPNs. Not about some security services like Tailscale which do not change the country and do not obfuscate traffic.

Russians seacrhing in Cyrilic I have no idea what they get, probably what you say. But person from UK searching in Russia will not get UK results. As I am, when searching in Polish language in Peru, NOT getting Polish results. What I am getting is not clear to me, but it is neither Polish nor Peruvian. Unless I click on side that I want this or that results, which not many people do and even when click that I want Polish, I am nearly sure I am not getting the same results as in Polonia.

But that is not the main point. You will be always to VPN traffic delivering the site that is always NOT optimized for the country. So it is like an intentional miss. The bookies/casinos are geographically fragmented each year more and more. USA is apart. Africa too. CIS too. Asia too. And Europe is fragmented itself.

But ok, for a person that is insane and does not do geotarget truly does not matter from which IP the visitor comes, I admit. The lottery is the same with or without the VPN. Most traffic is lost in either case. Even if not totally lost, promoting for example in France a website that does not have French creatives is a huge loss even if the French people can register and deposit in an English language. Even if 100% population is English fluent like in Scandinavia, the native language always adds a lot of points of credibility.

[dannyx]

Targeting countries with high VPN usage rates, the website is localized and translated into the local language. Otherwise, it would not make sense. In principle, if the website is in English, it is unlikely to be blocked by Russia. By translating it into Russian, it is locally adapted in terms of content and, as far as possible, the operator is friendly to Russians.

Indeed, casinos and bookmakers are geographically dispersed and diverse. A US-style bookmaker such as Mybookie has virtually no chance of operating elsewhere, even though it accepts most countries. I tried it once and it never worked out.

The native language adds credibility, I agree. But sometimes (unfortunately) it is not worth translating websites. I have 7 languages on my website, but I thought long and hard about how to choose them. I believe that in countries that block content quite efficiently, and where the English-language website is on the first page of Google, it is not worth translating/localizing, as it may even have the opposite effect to the one intended. Just an example: Germany, an English-language website ranks 5th on Google and generates some German traffic. Then we translate/localize this website into German, move up to second place, gain a little more traffic, and then our website is blocked by German GGL, and since the use of VPNs is not as common in Germany as it is in Russia, for example, this effectively equals a loss of players despite the work put into translation and localization.

[Sherlock]

I am not talking about the translation here.
I am purely talking about ads in the local language and landing pages in a local language.
Most people can read english or use a translator. But if they have to send their money somewhere to lose it, they want to feel they money do not disappear in some black hole (even if they are exactly throwing them to a black hole).

So native ads, landing pages and even local banking are in my experience the crucial issues with conversion to the FTD.

[dannyx]

So native ads, landing pages and even local banking are in my experience the crucial issues with conversion to the FTD.

Sure, that probably applies to 90%+ of players. Excluding conscious players who specifically know what service they are looking for.

[Sherlock]

Excluding conscious players who specifically know what service they are looking for.

Who are generally the ones who have lower affiliate value

[canaryjohn]

It really doesn't take much effort to see the explosive growth in the UK black market sector.

A quick ahrefs search shows us a 300% growth in searches for terms like "non gamstop casino"

There are rumours that more gambling sector taxes will soon be introduced. This pain will almost definitely be passed on to the player making black market options even more appealing.

It's not that this is a great thing for affiliates though. They lose protections too. It's very sad. The UK could have had an incredible market that was fair for operators, players and affiliates.

Edit: typo

[Sherlock]

Bring some numbers of yours or it is nothing. I personally have infinite growth in my black bookie, from -4 2 days ago I have 22 GBP revenue. A quick ahrefs search means nothing. It is just something potentially promising. I do not see black UK bookies that convert. Last so-so was BC game like 2 years ago and they withdrew the market really quickly.

[canaryjohn]

I'm suggesting black market use is up in the UK. NOT that those brands covert well for affiliates.

I'll never be able to bring my own numbers because I'm not a scumbag who targets problem gamblers.

[Ymercury]

The findings line up with what we’ve seen in several EU markets: when regulation becomes too tight or taxes too high, players naturally look for alternatives that offer better bonuses, fewer restrictions, and smoother onboarding. The challenge is that while tighter frameworks are meant to protect players, they often push recreational users into unlicensed environments where protections are minimal. A more balanced regulatory approach tends to keep players onshore, which benefits everyone players, operators, and affiliates alike.
It’ll be interesting to see whether policymakers start adjusting strategies or continue doubling down on restrictive measures despite the clear correlation.