The UK Gambling Commission deputy CEO Sarah Gardner has warned the industry that the regulator will not tolerate black market risks being “overstated” without evidence. On reflecting on the state of the iGaming industry since the introduction of the 2005 Gambling Act, the deputy CEO’s view is that the black market will continue to evolve and become more difficult to eliminate. This is despite past GC chief Andrew Rhodes saying in December 2021 that the black market was “nowhere near” enough of a threat to stop the Gambling Commission from taking necessary action against it.
All of this results in the argument that further regulations to the UK iGaming market will simply result in a bigger and more robust iGaming black market.
“There is an argument, sometimes made in Great Britain, that just because there are illegal sites and unregulated gambling – with no protections and bad outcomes for consumers – we should scale back or stop some of the interventions we think we need to make in the regulated market to mitigate against the risk of consumers jumping from regulated gambling into unregulated gambling,” she said in a speech to Danish regulator Spillemyndigheden.
“I cannot accept this argument. Indeed, I believe that no regulator should knowingly allow bad practices of the type we are talking about here, practices which can cause harm, to carry on in the regulated market.”
