UK Gambling Commission Acting CEO at IAGR in Lima: 267,000 Illegal Links Removed in a Year, with Court Application Powers to Block Domains Coming Soon

File photo: Plaza San Martín in Lima, Peru, photographed 1 September 2013. Geographic context for Lima, the host city of the IAGR conference; not a photograph of Sarah Gardner, the conference venue or her 2026 speech. Photo: Uighjot120 / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0. Display cropped to fit where necessary; no AI-generated imagery. Image source.

Sarah Gardner, acting chief executive of the UK Gambling Commission (UKGC), delivered a keynote speech on October 20 at the International Association of Gaming Regulators (IAGR) 2026 conference in Lima, Peru. The UKGC published the full speech on its website the following day. Its focus was tackling the illegal market: she disclosed enforcement figures for the previous financial year, outlined new powers expected soon and announced new research into the profiles of illegal website users.

Enforcement Results Before Additional Funding

Gardner said that in the 2025/26 financial year, which ended in March 2026, the UKGC had not yet drawn on the additional funding promised by the government. Relying primarily on cooperation with search engines, payment providers, industry and other government departments, it achieved the following:

• 741 cease-and-desist notices issued to advertisers and operators;
• 397,527 URLs reported to search engines, of which 266,667 were removed during the year;
• 1,068 websites submitted to search engines for removal from search results;
• 1,134 websites shut down or blocked from access in Britain.

In last November’s Budget, the UK government pledged £26 million over three years to strengthen the UKGC’s work against illegal gambling. The first £7 million arrived in April this year. Gardner said the UKGC was using the money to expand staffing and increase its activity, aiming to make it as difficult as possible to operate illegal gambling “at scale” in Britain.

She also disclosed that the UKGC would soon receive new powers to apply to courts to suspend the IP addresses and domain names of illegal websites. She noted that some regulators in the audience were already using similar tools.

She singled out B2B suppliers serving both licensed and illegal B2C operators, calling the practice “unacceptable”. She also said advertising, marketing and affiliate channels “too often promote both licensed and illegal operators”, and that social media and payment companies should take greater responsibility.

New Research: Four Groups of Illegal Website Users

The UKGC also released new research that day on the motivations and attitudes of illegal online gambling users, continuing the four-group classification introduced at the same time last year:

• Self-excluders: users who circumvent Britain’s GamStop self-exclusion system;
• Social explorers: users who do not consider themselves to be deliberately using illegal websites, but seek offers and new experiences and are strongly influenced by peers;
• Skilled advocates: users who consider their use of illegal websites intentional, distrust the licensed market, seek higher returns and personal freedom, and feel licensed websites put “obstacles everywhere”;
• Accidental tourists: users whose visits to illegal websites are mostly unintentional and occasional.

The quantitative component surveyed more than 4,000 people who had gambled in the previous four weeks, excluding those who only played lotteries, and used key driver analysis to measure associations between different factors and illegal website use. Across the full sample, the strongest associations were not common experience-related factors such as “finding better odds”, but intentional “access” issues, such as specifically seeking sites not blocked by GamStop or choosing sites that require less personal information. These were particularly common among self-excluders and skilled advocates. Based on the findings, the UKGC has added new questions to the Gambling Survey for Great Britain (GSGB) to monitor the scale and trends of illegal website use over time.

British Market Figures and Financial Risk Assessments

Gardner also cited annual figures to March 2026: gross gambling yield (GGY) in Britain’s regulated gambling industry was £17.5 billion, up 4.4% year on year; excluding lotteries, it was £13.2 billion, up 4.7%; and remote (predominantly online) betting, casino and bingo GGY was £8.3 billion, up 6.9%. The 2025 GSGB found that 2.4% of adults scored eight or more on the Problem Gambling Severity Index (PGSI), down from 2.7% in 2024.

On financial risk assessments (FRA), a particularly contentious issue within the industry, she reiterated that the UKGC board had decided in July to implement them, with the full consultation response to be published this autumn. According to her, fewer than 3% of customer accounts would require assessment once fully implemented, with the process frictionless for the vast majority of customers. The pilot found that high-spending gambling customers were two to four times as likely as the general population to have debt management plans, and two to five times as likely to have recorded a default in the previous 12 months.

Personnel Changes

Gardner’s substantive role is UKGC deputy chief executive, and she is currently acting chief executive. In her speech, she noted that the government had appointed Ruth Evans as the new chair a few weeks earlier for a five-year term; Tim Miller had left after ten years at the UKGC, with most of his responsibilities and National Lottery regulation passing to Sarah Fox, who joined last month after previously overseeing gambling policy in the UK government; and recruitment for former chief executive Andrew Rhodes’s successor was still under way.

Points to Watch

This year’s IAGR conference is taking place in Lima, Peru, with combating illegal markets among its central themes. Britain’s combination of search-engine removals, payment interception and court-ordered domain blocking closely resembles the approaches currently used by regulators in Brazil, Colombia, Peru and other Latin American markets. Gardner’s criticism of B2B suppliers and affiliate channels also addresses the grey supply-chain issues shared by many emerging markets.

Source

UKGC website, IAGR 2026 conference keynote speech (Sarah Gardner, published October 21, 2026): https://www.gamblingcommission.gov.uk/news/article/iagr-2026-conference-keynote-sarah-gardner-speech