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How to play The Alter Ego
A new report commissioned by Euromat, and produced by Regulus Partners and Helios, estimates that Europe’s black market has sustained a compound annual growth rate of 18% between 2019 and 2026, and will be worth up to €13 billion by the end of the year.
The report assesses black market activity across 28 European jurisdictions, including the UK, Netherlands and Germany. According to estimates across a mature black market ecosystem, 25 operators account for approximately 64% of relevant black market traffic.
Thanks to the “rapid growth of crypto currencies” and globally recognisable branding through marketing and sponsorships, this handful of operators are generating the majority of illegal gambling traffic across Europe.
How to play The Alter Ego
Last month, meanwhile, Betfred announced plans to shutter 132 of its UK betting shops, reducing its workforce by over 600 employees.
Betfred CEO Jo Whittaker said: “We have tried hard to protect all our sites and the colleagues who work in them, but the combined impact of higher employer National Insurance contributions, wage inflation, increases in gambling taxes and wider economic uncertainty has left us with no choice.”
Kyle has been with Clarion since December 2023, joining from the world of sports journalism, subsequently becoming a LatAm-facing senior reporter with iGB.
How to play The Alter Ego
Trace2Trace is relatively new, but Madsen says its underlying dataset has already grown to around 620,000. And it continues to grow, highlighting the scale of illegal operations in the gambling industry.
“We receive around 7,000 domains a day on average through the lists we monitor, including new and cloned sites,” he explains.
The system starts with domains that have already been identified by authorities. Trace2Trace then crawls them, looking for technical connections and similarities.
