L & L Europe Settles With UK Gambling Commission Over Withdrawal Delays

L & L Europe Limited will pay £900,000 under a regulatory settlement with the UK Gambling Commission after an investigation found failures including unfair withdrawal terms, anti-money laundering weaknesses and social responsibility shortcomings, the regulator announced on October 21, 2026.

L & L Europe runs seven online gambling websites, including allbritishcasino.com, casinocasino.com and hypercasino.com. The Commission’s public register lists the company’s head office in Mosta, Malta, and records 11 domain names against the business. Its remote casino licence has been active since November 1, 2014, and its remote general betting licence for real events has been active since October 3, 2018.

The settlement consists of a £900,000 payment in lieu of a financial penalty, which will be directed to the consolidated fund, the operator’s agreement to the publication of a statement of facts in the case, and a payment towards the Commission’s costs of investigating it.

Withdrawal and Fair-Terms Breaches

The Commission opened a regulatory review of the company’s remote operating licence under section 116 of the Gambling Act 2005 following a compliance assessment. The review found the licensee failed to comply with requirements of the Licence Conditions and Codes of Practice between October 2024 and October 2025.

On withdrawals, officials identified a term in the operator’s terms and conditions under which customers were permitted to request only one withdrawal at a time, with no further withdrawal allowed until the original one had been authorised. The Commission found the term unfair within the meaning of the Consumer Rights Act 2015, and officials witnessed customer withdrawal requests being withheld for reasons other than regulatory or legal requirements. The Commission acknowledged that the licensee acted swiftly to address the breach.

The operator’s Fraud & Collusion policy also led staff to manually review every fifth or tenth withdrawal for some customers, which resulted in those customers being required to provide additional information before withdrawals were processed. The Commission found this breached the customer identity condition, under which a withdrawal request must not trigger a demand for additional information as a condition of withdrawal if the licensee could reasonably have requested it earlier. According to the public statement, L & L Europe accepted the process delayed withdrawals and that the information could in some cases have been requested at an earlier stage, and it has amended the process so withdrawals are no longer withheld unless a regulatory or legal requirement applies.

Money Laundering, Safer Gambling and Technical Failings

The review identified a series of concerns with the operator’s money laundering and terrorist financing risk assessment. The Commission found the scoring methodology lacked clarity, the assessment did not clearly set out the identification, analysis and evaluation stages described in the regulator’s guidance, and it was unclear which controls applied to British consumers, how the risk posed by high-spending customers was mitigated, and how disproportionate spending was assessed. Controls to identify money laundering, terrorist financing and proliferation financing risks were largely based on financial thresholds and sampling at set thresholds, rather than on risk factors and customer risk profiles.

In one example set out in the statement, a customer deposited £4,400 within eight hours of registering an account and withdrew £50. The operator accepted a gambling account as the source of funds without considering that the customer’s bank account had been opened two weeks before registration, or that the money was not evidenced as coming from employment, business income or savings. The same customer twice supplied an incorrect address when asked for additional documentation while chasing a withheld withdrawal, without raising suspicion. The statement records that the licensee has now created a standalone money laundering and terrorist financing risk assessment specific to Great Britain.

Safer gambling alerts in place at the time of the assessment focused predominantly on financial thresholds. Alerts covering time spent gambling, failed deposits and number of deposits were activated on some websites but not across the operator’s entire suite, and were generated only when two indicators were present in a single day. In one case, a customer recorded 84 failed deposits within seven days for insufficient funds without the system identifying the potential for gambling-related harm. The operator’s process included only one strong indicator of harm, based on customer losses within 24 hours.

The Commission found the licensee could not demonstrate a process to evaluate the effectiveness of its overall approach to customer interaction, and officials saw no evidence of trialling or measuring impact. A customer who met the financial threshold on the day they registered did not receive a call required under the operator’s policy until two weeks later, by which point the customer had reached the same threshold numerous times. The review also identified failings involving two customers under 25: a 21-year-old who lost £6,500 within three days of opening an account, and an 18-year-old who lost £4,000 in eight minutes, with age-related risk indicators not taken into consideration.

Officials further observed multiple customers spending beyond financial limits set by the licensee or by the customer. One customer who had recently returned from self-exclusion, with an agreed £1,000 net monthly deposit limit, deposited £2,898 and withdrew £1,800 over a nine-day period, putting them £98 over the limit. The Commission found facilities had not been effectively implemented to make it possible for customers to set their own financial limits, breaching the technical standards condition of the licence.

Settlement and Industry Guidance

In resolving the case, the Commission cited aggravating factors: the failings were serious and potentially impacted the licensing objectives, and the breach arose in circumstances similar to previous cases that resulted in published lessons learned for the industry. Mitigating factors were that the licensee promptly put in place a remedial action plan and provided updates, fully co-operated with the investigation and provided information by agreed deadlines, and accepted the failings at an appropriately early stage.

Sue Young, Executive Director of Operations at the Commission, said: “A basic expectation is that when you have winnings you can withdraw those swiftly without hinderance from unfair terms and conditions or the operator failing to carry out checks at an earlier stage. That is essential to consumer trust.”

Alongside the settlement, the Commission published good-practice questions directing gambling operators to consider whether their anti-money laundering and social-responsibility policies, procedures and controls are fit for purpose, whether customer information is scrutinised in a timely manner, whether staff training is recorded and demonstrable, and whether they act quickly enough when customers display potential markers of harm.