Gambling Commission Escalates Illegal Society Lottery Clampdown

The UK Gambling Commission is to escalate its crackdown on illegal society lotteries.

That’s the verdict of the regulator’s director of policy Ian Angus, who told the annual conference of the Lotteries Council of the ‘big threat’ being posed by unlicensed lotteries to the legal sector.

And Angus revealed that in 2025 alone, some 356 illegal lottery draws were stopped by the Gambling Commission – with the possibility that many more are still available to UK players.

Cracking Down

His speech laid bare how widespread unlicensed gambling is in the UK – not just in terms of sports betting and casino gaming, but lotteries as well.

According to Angus, as well as the 356 illegal lotteries that were banned by social media channels in 2025, another 79 have already been disrupted this year.

Those numbers have doubled since 2024, which echoes the general growth of illegal gambling as a whole. In the past financial year, a staggering 266,667 URLs have been removed from Google and other search engines, with more than 130,000 other sites also reported.

A further 1,134 websites have been ‘disrupted’, which typically means they have been geo-blocked in the UK, with 741 Cease and Desist orders issued to the operators involved.

Angus also welcomed the government’s additional funding of £26 million, which will help the regulator to crack down even further on the plague of black market gambling.

The creation of the Illegal Gambling Taskforce, a government-led body that will work with a wide range of partners – including enforcement agencies and payment providers – to ‘frustrate’ the illegal sector has also been welcome by the Commission.

But Angus has called upon society lottery providers to play their part in reporting illegal activities to the regulator.

“Society lotteries play a vital role in our communities, raising important money for those charities and causes that otherwise may miss out. But lotteries are of course in law a gambling product and one that requires appropriate regulation to keep it safe, fair and crime free,” he said.

“We need and want to continue to work with others who have a role to play in keeping illegal gambling as small a part of the market as possible and that includes lotteries. So please do keep on sending in any intelligence you find or receive.”

Good Causes

The overall picture is rosy for lottery draws in the UK.

Ian Angus related a number of key industry statistics in his speech last week, which included reference to the Commission’s own Gambling Survey for Great Britain.

Those numbers reveal that around 48% of the adult population of the UK plays a lottery draw each week, while the Gross Gambling Yield (GGY) for the lottery sector reached £4.2 billion during the previous financial year to March 2025 – a new record high.

Early indications suggest that record could be broken again once the data for the last financial year are released, with more than £1 billion in GGY recorded between July and September 2025.

Breaking the niche down, Angus revealed that society lotteries – examples include the People’s Postcode Lottery and the Health Lottery – accounted for £200 million of that yield, with approximately 17% of the adult population in the UK regularly playing a society lottery.

And that makes societal lotteries the second-most popular gambling product in the domestic market, behind the National Lottery but ahead of sports betting.

“This all tells of a society lotteries sector that is raising more money than ever before for good causes up and down the country,” Angus commented.