UKGC research: children say peers use VPNs to reach gambling

The UK Gambling Commission has published new research looking at how much children know about virtual private networks, or VPNs, and whether these tools are being used to slip past age checks and reach gambling content online. The findings feed into the regulator’s wider work on under-18s and gambling, and land alongside a separate, growing concern at the Commission: that VPN use is making it harder to police the illegal gambling market as a whole.

What’s actually changed

The Commission has released a report measuring the awareness of VPNs among 11 to 17 year olds to better understand whether young people may be using these tools to access gambling-related content, as part of its work on children and young people and gambling. It sits alongside the Commission’s annual Young People and Gambling study, which last found that 49% of 11 to 17-year-olds had experienced gambling in the previous 12 months, with almost a third of all respondents (30%) having spent their own money on gambling in that period.

The VPN work is part of a bigger regulatory headache. On the adult side, Gambling Commission research published in 2025 found that 26% of surveyed consumers who admitted using unlicensed gambling sites used a VPN either all the time or specifically when visiting gambling websites. Because that pattern is invisible to normal location-based monitoring, the regulator increased its estimates of illegal-market traffic by between 24% and 51%, though by April 2026 those assumptions were under review again. The Commission has pointed to the UK’s Online Safety Act as having increased VPN usage, as users attempt to bypass age-verification requirements, complicating traffic analysis used by the Gambling Commission.

What it means for you

If you hold an account with a UK-licensed operator, none of this changes your existing protections directly, but it does explain why some sites are tightening location and device checks. Using a VPN on a licensed gambling account can trigger extra verification or a block, since even where using a VPN is legal, using it to circumvent gambling restrictions can violate operators’ rules, and some regulated operators will block access if they detect a VPN. For parents, the finding that children are aware of peers using VPNs is a reminder that household controls such as router-level filtering and device parental settings matter alongside GamStop, which only covers self-exclusion on licensed sites rather than device-level access. For adults who use GamStop or deposit limits as a safer-gambling tool, a VPN doesn’t remove those protections from your own account, but it can make it appear to an operator that you’re gambling from an unexpected location, which may prompt account reviews rather than smoother access.

The bigger picture

This fits a pattern of the Commission publicly wrestling with a measurement problem it can’t fully solve. The introduction of the Online Safety Bill had the effect of many consumers obtaining VPNs to circumvent restrictions on online activity, and the regulator has acknowledged that in November 2025 it could not reliably estimate how much players were spending with unlicensed operators, and none of its three measurement approaches were judged fit for purpose. Enforcement stakes were underlined this summer, when a £4.75 million UK Gambling Commission settlement in July offered the regulated gambling industry a useful warning about where responsibility can end up, with the Commission’s Director of Enforcement stressing that operators need to understand “who they are supplying their games to, how and where those games are being accessed in practice”. Extending that scrutiny down to children’s awareness of VPNs suggests the Commission sees this as a long-term safer-gambling issue rather than a one-off data glitch, and it’s likely to keep surfacing as the Commission continues expanding its Gambling Survey for Great Britain and Consumer Voice research programmes.

Sources

• UK Gambling Commission – Statistics and Research
• UK Gambling Commission – Annex C: Consumer research on VPN use
• BMM Magazine – The Compliance Blind Spot: What the Rise of VPN Gambling Means for Licensed UK Operators
• iGaming Business – The VPN dilemma: A regulatory loophole or gambling’s red herring?
• UK Gambling Commission – Illegal gambling: update on trends and data approach
• Gambling News – UKGC Says 49% of 11 to 17-Year-Olds Have Experienced Gambling