L&L Europe has agreed to pay £900,000 to the UK Gambling Commission after the regulator found that the operator unnecessarily delayed customer withdrawals and fell short of anti-money-laundering and safer-gambling requirements.
The regulatory settlement covered failures between October 2024 and October 2025 at the company, which runs seven UK-facing websites including allbritishcasino.com, casinocasino.com and hypercasino.com. The payment was made in lieu of a financial penalty, and L&L Europe will also contribute to the commission’s investigation costs, whose amount was not disclosed.
The review followed a compliance assessment of the company’s remote operating licence under Section 116 of the Gambling Act 2005. The commission considered the failings serious and potentially damaging to the licensing objectives, but agreed a settlement after L&L Europe cooperated, accepted the problems early and promptly introduced a corrective action plan.
A central issue was a term allowing customers to have only one withdrawal request open at a time. A second request could be made only once the first was authorised. The commission found the condition unfair under the Consumer Rights Act 2015 and treated it as a breach of Licence Condition 7.1.1.
Commission officials also found withdrawals being withheld for reasons other than legal or regulatory requirements. Under L&L Europe’s Fraud & Collusion policy, every fifth or 10th withdrawal for some customers was subject to manual review, which could require additional information before payment was processed.
L&L Europe accepted that those reviews delayed withdrawals and that some of the requested information could have been obtained earlier in the customer relationship. It has amended its process so that withdrawals are no longer withheld unless a legal or regulatory requirement applies.
Sue Young said customers should be able to withdraw winnings swiftly, without unfair terms or checks that an operator should have completed at an earlier stage. In July 2024, the commission said withdrawal delays were its leading source of complaints, generating around 2,000 complaints a year, and reiterated that identity checks should be completed before a customer is allowed to gamble.
The review also identified weaknesses in L&L Europe’s anti-money-laundering and counter-terrorist-financing controls. The operator relied largely on financial thresholds and sampling rather than individual customer risk profiles and other factors, while its risk assessment lacked clarity on identifying, analysing and evaluating risks and the controls used to address them.
In one case, a customer deposited £4,400 within eight hours of opening an account. L&L Europe accepted a gambling account as the customer’s source of funds without adequately considering that the linked bank account was recently opened or whether the money represented legitimate income or savings.
Its safer-gambling alerts focused predominantly on financial thresholds. Alerts covering time spent gambling, failed deposits and deposit frequency ran on some websites but not the full portfolio, and were generated only when two indicators appeared on the same day.
The commission cited several instances in which warning signs were missed. One customer made 84 failed deposits for insufficient funds in seven days without the system identifying a potential gambling-harm risk. A 21-year-old lost £6,500 in three days after opening an account, while an 18-year-old lost £4,000 in eight minutes; age and other indicators were not identified or acted upon in either case.
The regulator also found that L&L Europe had not effectively implemented the financial-limit facilities required by Remote Technical Standard 12. A customer returning from self-exclusion set a £1,000 net monthly deposit limit but ended £98 above it after depositing £2,898 and withdrawing £1,800 across nine days.
L&L Europe’s social-responsibility policy did not sufficiently explain how customer interactions should affect later behaviour and continuing risk of harm, and the company could not demonstrate an overall process for evaluating the effectiveness of its customer-interaction controls.
