BGC Urges Government to Target the Payments and Tech Behind Illegal Gambling Networks

The UK’s Betting and Gaming Council (BGC) is pushing a very familiar point: if you only block websites, the business just moves somewhere else. A new Fincord Intelligence report says the illegal online gambling market generated roughly $50 billion in revenue in 2025, which is exactly the kind of number that should make PSPs, affiliates, and infrastructure providers sit up.

1. Fincord Intelligence estimates that unlicensed gaming companies generated roughly $50 billion in revenue in 2025. The report describes the illegal gambling market as a mature and sophisticated ecosystem rather than a loose collection of rogue sites, which matters because mature ecosystems do not disappear when one domain gets taken down.
2. According to the report, these operators often target self-excluded players and advertise through search engines, social media, affiliates, and influencers. Fincord says they also avoid standard controls by skipping identity checks, financial checks, and betting limits, which is the part that should interest payment providers and compliance teams: the business model depends on frictionless access, not just traffic.
3. The report says illicit operators use mirror domains and VPN access to make enforcement harder. It also says the research is based on some 5,000 operator structures that used as many as 15,000 websites and apps, which gives a sense of scale: this is not one bad actor with one bad domain, but a distributed network with many touchpoints.
4. Fincord Intelligence says blocking unlicensed operators alone is not a viable long-term strategy and argues that governments should also target intermediaries such as payment providers, affiliates and marketers, software suppliers, and infrastructure hosts. A spokesperson said the ecosystem is built on an international network of operators, payment providers, crypto services, technology suppliers, and marketers, and that relying on blocking individual websites is no longer a winning strategy.
5. The BGC’s CEO, Grainne Hurst, said the research shows illegal gambling is “no longer simply a regulatory issue” and called on the government to coordinate law enforcement, regulators, payment providers, and technology companies to target the networks supporting these operators. The report also points to Ukraine, where gambling businesses with ties to Russia have continued to target local audiences, creating financial and national security risks alongside the payment risk everyone in this sector already knows too well.