Nobody publishes a reliable picture of the offshore casinos taking money from British players. The Gambling Commission has said plainly that it cannot size the unlicensed market with confidence. So we are publishing what we can see from our own casework: an analysis of the 62 casino and betting operators UK players ask us about most, each researched against licence registers, regulator records and the operator’s own terms, and each documented in our operator directory with sources.
The key findings
- 52 of the 62 operators (84%) sit outside GamStop, the national self-exclusion scheme, at a time when GamStop reported more than 562,000 people actively excluded at the end of 2025.
- 31 of the 62 (exactly half) have at least one regulator or court action on public record, 37 documented actions in total, from UK Gambling Commission settlements to enforcement by regulators in Spain, Sweden, the Netherlands and Australia.
- 36 of the 52 offshore operators restrict the United Kingdom in their own terms, yet every one of them is in this dataset because UK players played there, lost there, or asked us about them.
- Seven operators trade with no current gambling licence at all, and a further four display licence claims that could not be validated against any official register.
- Six of the 62 have closed, lapsed or gone dark since the records began, several of them with player balances at stake.
Where the market is licensed, when it is licensed
The jurisdiction spread of the 62 operators tells the story of the market’s architecture. Curaçao accounts for 28 of them, nearly half, reflecting its decades as the default flag for UK-facing offshore gambling; our guide to how Curaçao casino law works explains what its 2024 reform did and did not change. Anjouan, an autonomous island of the Comoros whose licensing bodies have been publicly questioned by the Comoros authorities themselves, accounts for ten. Malta and Gibraltar, the two offshore regimes with genuine supervisory weight, account for eleven between them. Four operators claim Costa Rica, a country that issues no gambling licence of any kind. Only five of the 62 hold a current UK Gambling Commission licence, with a further five having held and surrendered one.
Five in six are beyond GamStop’s reach
GamStop binds only operators licensed in Great Britain. That leaves 52 of these 62 operators legally invisible to a scheme that, by its own published figures, had more than 562,000 people actively excluded at the end of 2025, with registrations among 16 to 24 year olds up roughly 40% year on year. The mechanics of that gap, and why excluded players end up on exactly these sites, are set out in why offshore casinos slip through GamStop. Campaign-commissioned monitoring presented to parliamentarians in 2025 found that 84% of illegal gambling promotion targeting British players was themed around the phrase “not on GamStop”: the protection scheme’s name has become the black market’s best-performing advertising keyword.
The scheme built to protect self-excluded players is now the search term used to find their way around it.
Half the market has a regulator record
Thirty-one of the 62 operators carry at least one documented regulator or court action. The list crosses borders: the UK Gambling Commission’s record 19.2 million pound settlement with the William Hill Group and 17 million pounds from Entain in 2022; Spain’s DGOJ fining Santeda International B.V. five million euros; Sweden’s Spelinspektionen ordering Ryker B.V. to stop serving Swedish players; the Dutch regulator’s record 19.68 million euro fine against Gammix Limited; Australia’s ACMA formally warning Dama N.V. Each action is recorded in the relevant operator file with its issuing body and source.
Set against that record is a trend line worth sitting with. The Gambling Commission’s enforcement against licensed operators totalled 60.1 million pounds in 2022/23, 13.4 million in 2023/24, and 4.2 million pounds in 2024/25, a fall of roughly 93% in two years. The regulator attributes improving compliance among licensees, and that reading may well be right. But it means the enforcement pressure and the player risk now live in different places: the licensed market is behaving better while the unlicensed market, where no UK fine can ever land, absorbs record numbers of self-excluded players.
The restriction contradiction
Thirty-six of the 52 offshore operators list the United Kingdom as restricted or excluded in their own terms and conditions. On paper, no British customer should have an account at any of them. In practice, every operator in this dataset earned its place through UK custom: players who deposited, lost, and then discovered that the site’s own small print said they should never have been let in. That contradiction is not academic. An operator that accepted deposits its own terms prohibited has an awkward question to answer, and in our casework it is often the beginning of a recovery claim rather than the end of one. The most documented example is the allegation by the investigative body GAMRS, reported in December 2025, that a single Curaçao network generates more than 2 billion pounds a year with UK players making up nearly two thirds of its flagship brand’s traffic, despite terms restricting the UK. That is a third-party investigative claim, not a regulator’s finding, and we present it as such; the pattern it describes matches what the individual operator files record brand by brand.
Licences you cannot check, and casinos that vanish
Seven of the 62 operators trade with no current licence: the authorisation lapsed, was surrendered, or never existed. Four more display licence numbers that fail validation, from an Anjouan credential the official validator returns as not licensed to claims that cannot be read at all because the site blocks British connections. Six operators have closed or gone dark entirely, several holding player balances when they went, and our files on those brands now serve people trying to trace what remains. How to test a licence claim yourself, in minutes and for free, is set out in how to check whether a casino is licensed.
The number nobody can publish
What do British players actually lose to this market? No official figure exists, and the honest answer is that nobody credibly knows. The Gambling Commission’s own research programme concluded that available methods offer only limited insight and cautioned against estimates with unclear methodology. The numbers in circulation measure different things: industry-commissioned research put stakes with unregulated operators around 2.7 billion pounds a year; campaign-commissioned monitoring valued the illegal market at 379 million pounds in half a year and modelled that self-excluded players alone could account for hundreds of millions in losses; the GAMRS investigation alleged 2 billion pounds through one network. These figures cannot be added together and none is official. The absence of a reliable public number is precisely why we publish this dataset: the operator files are small, verifiable facts in a market that otherwise runs on estimates.
Method and limits
This analysis covers the 62 operators documented in our directory as of 2 July 2026. The dataset is built from casework demand, meaning operators UK players contacted us about or searched for, so it is a map of where British players actually get hurt, not a census of the whole market, and it naturally over-represents brands that generate disputes. Every file is compiled against primary sources, licence registers, regulator publications and the operator’s own terms, complaint patterns are attributed to the platforms that record them rather than asserted as findings, and the process, review cadence and corrections policy are published in our editorial standards. Where a fact could not be verified, the file says so.
Citing this research
Journalists, researchers, support services and policymakers are welcome to cite this analysis with attribution to Clinton & Co Advisors and a link to this page. The per-operator records behind every figure are public, each with its own source list, and corrections are welcomed through our contact page.
If you are one of the people behind these numbers, someone who self-excluded and still lost money to an offshore site, the data has a practical edge: the routes that may apply to you are set out in your rights at non-GamStop casinos, and a free, confidential eligibility check will tell you honestly whether your facts support a claim.
If gambling is causing you harm, free and confidential support is available right now. The National Gambling Helpline is on 0808 8020 133, GamCare is at gamcare.org.uk, GAMSTOP (gamstop.co.uk) blocks all UK-licensed sites, and BetBlocker (betblocker.org) blocks the rest, free, across your devices.
Sources
- Clinton & Co operator directory, 62 operator files with per-file sources (clintonandco.co.uk/operators), compiled to 2 July 2026.
- GamStop, biannual data and registration reports: 562,000+ active exclusions at end of 2025 (gamstop.co.uk/corporate/blog).
- Gambling Commission annual reports 2022-23, 2023-24 and 2024-25: enforcement totals of £60.1m, £13.4m and £4.2m (gamblingcommission.gov.uk).
- Gambling Commission, research on the challenges of estimating the illegal online market (gamblingcommission.gov.uk, 2024-2025).
- Frontier Economics for the Betting and Gaming Council, black-market stakes estimate (frontier-economics.com, September 2024). Industry-commissioned estimate.
- Yield Sec figures presented via Peers for Gambling Reform, reported by iGaming Today (igamingtoday.com, September 2025). Campaign-commissioned estimate.
- GAMRS investigation of the Santeda network, reported by GamblingNews and EGR Intel (December 2025). Third-party allegation.
- Hansard, Commons debate on gambling regulatory reform, 2 December 2025 (hansard.parliament.uk).
General information, not legal advice. We are not solicitors or a law firm. We connect clients with regulated legal partners.