Offshore gambling as a social practice: socio-material dynamics in online gambling communities

Offshore gambling remains a challenge despite regulatory tightening; yet limited attention has been given to the socio-material environments that make unlicensed play accessible and routinely practiced. This study employs a mixed-methods design, combining BERTopic modelling of 7,901 posts from Flashback.org with qualitative analysis of 392 user narratives, guided by Social Practice Theory. Topic modelling maps dominant discursive patterns, while theory-informed qualitative coding examines how users navigate payment pathways, interpret regulatory environments, and sustain everyday participation. Findings show that offshore gambling persists through the interplay of material infrastructures—digital payment providers, verification systems, and licensing regimes—and evolving user competences, including folk-legal reasoning and peer-based troubleshooting. In addition, shared cultural meanings render the practice meaningful to participants, legitimizing engagement through narratives of rationality, fairness, and adaptation. These dynamics are synthesized in a conceptual model that explains offshore gambling as a self-stabilizing social practice shaped by ongoing interactions between infrastructures, user competencies, and shared meanings under regulatory, market, and technological pressure. This perspective underscores the need for harm-reduction approaches that move beyond individual or policy shortcomings and address the broader socio-material conditions sustaining offshore gambling.