Unlicensed operators took $97.4 billion from US online gamblers in 2025, or 77% of a total online market worth $125.6 billion in gross gaming revenue (GGR), according to a report published in August 2026 by Gaming Compliance International (GCI) and commissioned by the Campaign for Fairer Gambling (CFG).
The same analysts put illegal online revenue at $67.1 billion for 2024. That is growth of 45.2% in twelve months. Regulated online revenue rose 23% over the same period, from $23 billion to $28.3 billion, and the combined market grew 39.4%, from $90.1 billion to $125.6 billion.
The unlicensed share moved from 74% in 2024 to 77% in 2025. In 2023 it was 71%, on illegal revenue of $40.9 billion. Those earlier estimates were published under the Yield Sec name. GCI acquired Yield Sec in November 2025.
What the CFG report argues
The report’s case is that legalising online sports betting and casino games has expanded the total addressable market without reducing the unlicensed sector’s share of it, and without a matching increase in enforcement against illegal sites.
GCI builds the analysis around a loss ratio, which divides state GGR by state population and income to express gambling losses as a share of income per capita. States with both legal online sports betting and legal online casino averaged 1.38% in 2025, against 0.44% in states where neither product is legal. Louisiana recorded the highest ratio of gambling spend to income and the highest ratio of unregulated spend to income, with most of that spend going to unlicensed operators.
Derek Webb, who funds the CFG, said:
“The legal sector uses the presence of the illicit sector to demand legalisation.”
Webb added that action against bad actors in the unlicensed sector should be the priority for all stakeholders.
Webb invented Three Card Poker and 21+3, sold both games and retired from the gambling business in 2011. He then funded the UK campaign that cut the maximum stake on fixed-odds betting terminals (FOBTs) from £100 a spin to £2, a change that took effect in April 2019 and cut machine revenue by around £750 million. He has aimed the same money at the United States since 2023.
The AGA puts the online figure four times lower
The American Gaming Association (AGA), the trade body for licensed US operators, published its own sizing study using research firm The Innovation Group, which surveyed 2,454 US adults and counted unregulated machines. It found that Americans wager $673.6 billion a year with illegal and unregulated operators, producing $53.9 billion in revenue and $15.3 billion in lost state taxes, or 31.9% of the total US gaming market, up 22% since 2022.
That $53.9 billion covers retail as well as online. Unregulated skill machines account for $30.3 billion of it, across more than 625,000 units, a 7.7% increase since 2022. The online categories come to $23.6 billion: $18.6 billion in illegal iGaming, up nearly 38% since 2022, and $5 billion in illegal sports betting on an $84 billion handle.
Set against GCI’s $97.4 billion, that is a gap of roughly four times on the same question.
Two methods, two answers
The AGA approach asks consumers what they did and extrapolates from the sample. GCI uses what it calls value per visit: keyword sweeps to identify every commercial and referral gambling destination able to reach a given jurisdiction, then machine learning to price that traffic against known legal-market figures. Ismail Vali, GCI president, has argued that survey methods understate the illegal market because unlicensed operators do not file returns.
Neither method produces audited numbers, and GCI’s have been questioned before. The firm also puts global unregulated online wagering at $5.9 trillion. Its estimate of $81.4 billion for global crypto gambling revenue was disputed by blockchain analytics company Tanzanite, which tracked more than 90 wallet addresses and put the sector above $10 billion, around half of that accounted for by Stake’s self-reported revenue. Webb has said GCI estimated legal-market figures accurately ahead of official data publication, and that he has seen non-public work that leaves him no reason to question the numbers.
Both sides hold a commercial position. GCI sells monitoring technology to governments and regulators. The AGA represents licensed operators that cite illegal-market size when arguing for wider legalisation and lower tax.
The read-across for Europe
The measurement dispute is not confined to the United States. GCI’s global work counts a third category alongside licensed and unlicensed activity: products that use stake, uncertainty and reward but are not currently classified as gambling, among them the prediction markets now reshaping US sports betting. European regulators face the same classification question, and European operators use channelisation estimates in policy arguments the way US stakeholders use these figures.
Operators in Europe have also funded their own research into unlicensed activity, including Entain’s work on illegal gambling networks promoted through UK social media. In each case the underlying data sits with a private party rather than a regulator.
Neither GCI nor the AGA publishes the data behind its estimate, so the four-fold gap will stand until one of them opens its methodology to outside testing. Until that happens, legislators on both sides of the Atlantic will be choosing between two numbers that support opposite conclusions about whether legalisation shrinks the illegal market.
Source: Gaming Compliance International
