Why blocking websites alone won’t stop illegal gambling

The British Betting and Gaming Council (BGC), which represents licensed operators in the UK, has published data showing that the gross revenue of the global illegal online gambling market amounted to approximately $50 billion in 2025. In the same year, around 5,000 operator entities were operating through more than 15,000 websites and apps, using mirror domains, VPN access, and browser extensions that allow a blocked resource to return online within a matter of hours. But there is another figure that is perhaps even more important: approximately 35% of payments on illegal gambling platforms in 2025 were made using cryptocurrency, and this share could rise to 70% by 2030.

It is worth clarifying one potential misunderstanding right away, because very different figures are also being cited in the public domain. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime estimates the volume of betting on illegal markets at between $340 billion and $1.7 trillion per year. There is no contradiction here: trillions refer to turnover, all the money staked by players, across all illegal markets, not just online gambling. The $50 billion figure refers to the gross revenue of illegal online gambling operators, meaning what remains with them after winnings have been paid out. Revenue is always only a fraction of turnover, so the two estimates describe the same scale from different perspectives.

For Ukraine, this is not some distant statistic but an accurate description of what we face every day. For years, we have been talking about combating illegal gambling in terms of blocking websites. A site blocked today reappears tomorrow under a new domain, with the same player database and the same owner. As long as the payment channel remains operational, the operator remains alive. As long as the operator remains alive, any list of blocked resources is more a matter of reporting than a tangible result.

That is why the fight against illegal operators is primarily a fight against infrastructure, not against a brand name or a website address. This means targeting payment services, cryptocurrency intermediaries, affiliate networks, advertisers, software providers, and hosting companies. This is precisely what the BGC is telling governments: the focus should be on what allows the illegal ecosystem to exist, rather than on individual addresses in a browser. The Ukrainian Gambling Council has been insisting on this for years, and international data only confirms our position.

The second part of the problem lies within the legal sector itself, and it receives far less attention. Payment systems and banks must also have appropriate regulation governing their area of activity. Today, we are seeing a situation in which a legal player on a licensed platform faces deposit and withdrawal limits, delays, additional checks, and sudden transaction blocks, while an illegal platform offers none of these restrictions. Illegal operators compete not on product quality, but on the absence of constraints: deposit bonuses of up to 500%, faster withdrawals, and no identity verification. The BGC identifies this as a key competitive advantage of the black market. When the burden of payment restrictions and stringent rules falls exclusively on the licensed sector, the state is effectively pushing players into the shadows. The rules governing payment systems and banks should be uniform, predictable, and clear, while limits should be justified rather than turning legal gambling into an obstacle course.

The third conclusion concerns cryptocurrency, and it is the most painful one for the industry. Crypto casts a shadow over the legal gambling business. A licensed Ukrainian operator works with transparent payments, player identification, taxes, and reporting to the regulator. Yet when the words “gambling” and “cryptocurrency” are mentioned together in the public debate, it is the legal market that suffers the reputational damage, even though it is the illegal market that uses this tool. An anonymous crypto payment is not merely a technological trend; it is a way to conceal the beneficiary, circumvent restrictions, and move money beyond the reach of financial monitoring.

And this is where the issue becomes anything but abstract for us. The data published by the BGC specifically mentions Ukraine: citing assessments by Ukrainian authorities, it notes that some illegal gambling platforms are linked to Russia. This means that money spent by Ukrainian players may directly or indirectly serve the economic interests of the aggressor state and facilitate sanctions evasion. From this point onward, illegal gambling is no longer simply a matter of lost tax revenue, it becomes an issue of national security.

The agenda is therefore clear. The state must shift its focus from domains to money: cut off payment routes, work with cryptocurrency intermediaries, and hold advertisers and affiliates accountable for directing traffic to illegal resources. Regulation of the payments sector must be designed in such a way that legal players have no rational reason to move into the shadows. And the legal market, which pays taxes and meets all its obligations to the state and to players, should finally stop being held responsible for the reputation of those who pay nothing.