In May 2026, Regulus Partners published The online gambling Black Market in Europe on behalf of EUROMAT — an analysis of Black Market size and causes across 28 European jurisdictions. The site and traffic discovery behind it was carried out by Helios.
The headline finding is stark. Across the 28 markets analysed — the EU27 excluding Malta and Luxembourg, plus the UK, Serbia and Montenegro — the Black Market was worth around €12bn in net revenue in 2025, roughly 25% of all online gambling in those jurisdictions. It has tripled since 2019, a compound annual growth rate of 18%, and is calculated at around €13bn for 2026. Over the same period the licensed-but-offshore 'grey' market halved, from about €3bn to €1.5bn.
That growth is not accidental, and the report is careful about the cause: Black Markets are created by policies that generate consumer friction. Lack of choice, banned or distorted products, price distortions from tax, consumer-facing taxes, expenditure restrictions and advertising bans each push engaged players toward supply that sits outside the regulated market. There are real trade-offs behind every one of those measures — but the report's conclusion is that they become counter-productive at the point where they drive players out rather than tax or protect them.
What the discovery covered
Between March and May 2026 Helios ran discovery across all 28 jurisdictions to identify the sites actively marketing themselves to players in each one, market by market and in local languages. Regulus Partners then cross-referenced that site list against traffic analysis to establish scale.
What came back:
- 978 unique sites were identified across the 28 markets
- 709 of them carried measurable traffic
- Counted per market, those sites produced 2,569 site-country traffic pairs — meaning the average captured site was drawing players from four different countries
- Every jurisdiction except Montenegro had more than 40 active Black Market sites marketing into it; the largest markets had around 140
- In Bulgaria, Croatia, Italy, the Netherlands, Serbia and Spain, Black Market sites outnumbered licensed operators outright
That last point is worth sitting with. In six of the markets analysed, a player looking for somewhere to gamble online has more unlicensed options in front of them than licensed ones. Even where licensed sites are ahead, the gap is rarely wide enough to constitute meaningful channelling by availability alone.
A concentrated core and a very long tail
The ecosystem splits cleanly in two, and each half defeats a different kind of enforcement.
At the top, it is concentrated and professionalised. The 25 largest URL groups accounted for around 64% of all captured Black Market traffic, with the largest single group at around 12% and the largest single brand at 10% — shares that stand comparison with domestically licensed operators. These are not fly-by-night sites. They have recognisable brands, sponsorship, and product ranges built to differentiate. The clearest common factor among them is cryptocurrency: crypto-led operations both dodge payment blocking and offer something almost no European jurisdiction currently licenses. Most hold licences in Curaçao or Anjouan, where scrutiny is light and opaque ownership structures make enforcement slow at best.
At the other end sits the long tail: around 60% of the sites found had comparatively little traffic each. Individually they are too small to advertise competitively, so they run on affiliate networks instead — review and bonus sites that are cheap to spin up and hard to act against even where the law is clear. And they are built to be disposable. The report documents numbered domains designed to be regenerated endlessly once blocked (16spingranny39.com and its thousands of siblings), brand families localised per market with national suffixes and local language to look domestic, and purpose-built sites targeting specific regulatory gaps such as self-exclusion schemes. Greece's blocklist now contains more than 11,000 sites — an indication of how fast that tail regenerates.
Austria, as a worked example
The country sections put numbers against each market. Austria's Black Market has grown to more than 35% of the total market, around €500m in 2026 — driven by a monopoly on online gaming that leaves engaged players without domestic choice, a 45% GGR rate on gaming that discourages EEA investment, and betting taxed on stakes since April 2025. The pattern repeats with local variations across all 28 country profiles.
Why finding-level discovery matters
A revenue model can tell you a market is leaking. It cannot tell you where to look. The difference between an estimate and an enforceable list is whether someone can name the sites, show what they were doing, and show when.
That is the level Helios works at. Discovery runs per jurisdiction across four independent channels — local-language search, active advertising, mobile app stores and national press — because no single channel sees a whole market, and a finding that appears in only one source deserves less confidence than one that appears in several. Every site is recorded as its own finding, with its own evidence and its own history, rather than being folded into an estimate.
Grouping those findings into operators is where the value sits, and also where the discipline has to be strongest. Sites that share a favicon, a brand name, an affiliate tag or a redirect path are very often the same business — the localised brand families in this report are exactly that pattern. Helios surfaces those shared signals and leaves the conclusion to a human analyst, because a shared signal is evidence, not proof.
The report itself states the principle better than any product page could:
Note, the presence of traffic from customers to sites that do not have an appropriate licence to operate in their jurisdiction does not prove wrongdoing on the part of the operator (eg, they may block registration or deposits), but it does clearly indicate consumer demand.
That distinction — between what has been observed and what has been determined — is the one that makes this kind of intelligence usable by a regulator. Helios findings are observations, drawn from publicly available information, carrying their source and their capture date, reviewed by an analyst before they are recorded. What they support is a decision. They are not the decision.
The full report — The online gambling Black Market in Europe — is published by Regulus Partners on behalf of EUROMAT. To discuss jurisdiction-level discovery, get in touch.