Affiliate compliance for gambling is constantly shifting. Yet new changes in the UK could make the job even harder for marketers.
About 5% of British gamblers say they currently mix licensed UK sites with offshore ones. Another 6% used to but have since ceased to do so, while a large portion of both groups had no idea the operator they were playing on was illegal until someone told them. As the UK grapples with offshore operators and channelisation rates, affiliate compliance is getting tougher.
What UK Gamblers Reveal About Unlicensed Sites
The reasons people head offline to use unlicensed casinos are hard to quantify. This is especially evident when the UK has some of the most forward-thinking casinos on the planet, including everything from supplying the best games to employing up-and-coming payment methods. Its own affiliates are also extremely stringent. For example, this list of the top 50 online casinos in the UK features only those registered and licensed. Providing just as much column space on this as the bonuses and game selections, it also contains a comprehensive listing of the terms and conditions that are attached.
Despite this, around one in ten UK gamblers has used the black market. The figure comes from a survey of just over a thousand UK gamblers commissioned by the UK Gambling Commission in September 2025, the regulator’s first real look at consumer behaviour in the unlicensed market. The conclusion is uncomfortable: the line between legal and offshore is fuzzier than the industry has wanted to admit.
Time-spent data backs it up. Engagement with illegal sites doesn’t follow a clean seasonal curve. Peaks landed in January, March and August 2025, each spike pushing time-on-site into nine-figure territory in minutes. The Commission flags caution on these numbers because the Online Safety Act triggered a wave of VPN adoption that hides part of the traffic that used to be visible.
The intent question is the more useful one. A real share of users moved to offshore sites still believing they were on a UK-licensed brand. That isn’t a knowing risk-taker problem but a discoverability problem affiliates inherit at the top of the funnel.
The Four Player Segments Reshaping Affiliate Risk
The qualitative half of the report splits offshore users into four behavioural groups: Self-Excluders, Advocates, Social Explorers and Accidental Tourists. Each one walks into the unlicensed market through a different door, and that matters for how affiliates screen their own traffic.
Self-Excluders are the worst category to read about. These are players already on UK self-exclusion schemes who go offshore to bypass their own block, and their reported experiences skew sharply negative.
Advocates are the deliberate users. They may look for bigger game catalogues, multi-currency wallets, and higher limits. They know exactly what they are doing.
Social Explorers tend to arrive via social-media ads and streamer placements. Accidental Tourists are the group every affiliate should be losing sleep over, as they are the players who never noticed the site they signed up to wasn’t UK-licensed at all.
The 2025 UKGC Crackdown: WhatsApp Bookies to Spribe’s Licence
The Commission spent 2025 making examples. One case involved an illegal WhatsApp bookmaking operation in Stoke-on-Trent. The operator failed to pay out a £269,000 customer balance, picked up a 30-week suspended sentence, a community service order and roughly £290,000 in compensation and costs. The takeaway is awkwardly broad: “unlicensed” can mean a slick offshore casino brand, or it can mean a guy with a phone.
The Spribe case was the more strategically painful one. The studio behind Aviator had its UK operating licence suspended in October 2025 for breaching hosting requirements. The suspension came off in March 2026, but Aviator stayed off UK-licensed operators well after. Anyone whose UK funnel leaned on crash-game traffic spent months pushing players towards a product that, technically, wasn’t there.
Five Operator-Vetting Checks That Actually Matter in 2026
Start with marketing channel risk. ASA scrutiny on social and influencer placements is getting harder, and most due diligence stops at how an operator pays its affiliates without ever asking how those affiliates source their traffic.
AML maturity is the next layer. UK rules on money laundering and crypto controls tightened again in 2026, so pull an operator’s AML history before signing up and look at past breaches, what was remediated, and how fast.
Safer-gambling controls come third. The black-market data shows self-excluded players actively look for workarounds, so real-time Gamstop screening is the floor, not the ceiling. Confirm affiliates aren’t quietly funnelling players who have signed onto exclusion schemes into bonus journeys.
Licence scope is the lesson Spribe wrote on the wall. A remote operating licence isn’t the only one that matters. You must ask which sub-licences, such as hosting and software, the operator and its game suppliers actually hold. If they can’t answer quickly, that is already the answer.
David Prior
David Prior is the editor of Today News, responsible for the overall editorial strategy. He is an NCTJ-qualified journalist with over 20 years’ experience, and is also editor of the award-winning hyperlocal news title Altrincham Today. His LinkedIn profile is here.
