Germany and the UK sign a letter of intent to share data on unlicensed gambling sites

The GGL organized the meeting, which also covered site blocking, advertising rules, anti-money laundering, prediction markets, and public awareness, with Italy’s ADM among the other regulators taking part in the broader discussions. The letter of intent itself is narrow in scope. It covers only the exchange between the GGL and the UK Gambling Commission specifically, and doesn’t extend to the GGL’s separate, ongoing push for changes to Section 284 of Germany’s Criminal Code around prosecuting foreign operators. Neither regulator has disclosed how the information exchange will actually work in practice, what categories of data could be shared, or when any exchange might begin. What’s described as a longer-term goal is a joint pilot project between Germany and the UK specifically for exchanging data on unlicensed gambling websites, though that remains a stated intention rather than an active program for now.

This builds on a broader European push that started gaining shape in November 2025, when regulators from Austria, France, the UK, Italy, Portugal, and Spain issued a joint declaration on curbing illegal online gambling and called on social media platforms and other digital services to tighten their controls against ads from unlicensed providers. Germany’s GGL publicly backed that declaration’s positions at the time but couldn’t formally co-sign it, a limitation tied to Germany’s federal structure, since the GGL acts on behalf of the states on gambling enforcement rather than speaking for the country as a whole. A unified, EU-wide database of unlicensed operators hasn’t been confirmed by anyone involved, a step beyond what regulators have managed even with the approved-operator whitelists individual countries have built on their own. What exists right now is a bilateral agreement to talk, between two of the region’s more active regulators, with the practical mechanics, and whether other countries eventually join a shared system, still an open question.