L & L Europe Limited will pay £900,000 (US$1.20 million) as part of a regulatory settlement with the UK Gambling Commission for regulatory breaches involving customer withdrawals, anti-money laundering controls, and social responsibility.
The company operates seven gambling websites, including allbritishcasino.com, casinocasino.com, and hypercasino.com.
The investigation found that the company had unfair withdrawal terms requiring customers to wait for an existing withdrawal request to be authorised before submitting another. The commission said the term was unfair under the Consumer Rights Act 2015.
The operator also manually reviewed every fifth or tenth withdrawal for some customers, requiring them to provide additional information before their funds could be released. The commission’s requirements state that operators must not request additional information as a condition of withdrawal if it could reasonably have been obtained earlier.
The investigation also identified weaknesses in the company’s anti-money laundering controls. Its measures for identifying money laundering and terrorist financing risks relied largely on financial thresholds and sampling, rather than risk factors and individual customer profiles.
The company also failed to follow its own customer due diligence procedures, including assessing risks associated with newly opened bank accounts and verifying whether funds came from employment, business income or savings.
Social responsibility failures included activating safer gambling alerts on some websites but not across its entire portfolio. The company also lacked a process to assess the effectiveness of its overall approach to customer interaction.
Sue Young, Executive Director of operations at the Commission, said gambling operators must treat consumers fairly and ensure winnings can be withdrawn promptly without unfair terms or delays caused by checks that could have been completed earlier.
“That is essential to consumer trust,” she said. “There may be occasions where a gambling business can ask consumers for information at withdrawal to fulfil legal obligations, but this was not the case here.”
“We hope this case sends a clear reminder to the industry that, although much of our enforcement action frequently relates to anti-money laundering and social responsibility failings, we will not hesitate to act when we see incidents of gambling not being fair and open,” Young added.
