L&L Europe Face £900,000 UKGC Fine Over Delayed Withdrawals and AML Failings

L&L Europe, which operates eleven UK gambling sites including All British Casino, Pub Casino and Fun Casino, have been fined £900,000 by the UK Gambling Commission over charges that include deliberately delaying payouts.

The firm, which operates out of Malta and has been licensed in the UK since 2014, was also found liable for a series of social responsibility and anti-money laundering breaches.

Sue Young, the regulator’s executive director of operations, described L&L Europe as having failed to act in a ‘fair and open’ manner.

Delaying Payouts

The company was found to have violated the Consumer Rights Act (2015) over a little-known policy in which their customers were only allowed to request one withdrawal at a time.

In addition, they could only request a new payout once the original withdrawal had been made – that was described as ‘unfair’ by the Gambling Commission as part of their compliance assessment.

L&L also deployed a system of manual checks in which the fifth and tenth withdrawal of selected customers was screened. In these cases, some individuals were asked to provide further documentation before the payment would be made.

And that was considered to be a breach of Licence Condition 17.1.1, which strictly forbids an operator from requesting additional data from a customer once they have actioned a withdrawal request where they could have ‘reasonably requested that information earlier.’

Other Licence Failings

L&L Europe let down their players with their draconian withdrawal policies… and they also breached their operating licence in their social responsibility and anti-money laundering policies.

The Gambling Commission’s investigation found that some of the brands had adequate safer gambling tools and procedures in place – but not all of them did. It was also found that a safer gambling alert was only triggered when a player showcased two indicators of problem gambling behaviour, rather than just one.

One example saw an individual attempt to make 84 deposits into their account in the space of just seven days. But because they only showcased one type of behaviour associated with possible harm, an alert wasn’t triggered.

L&L’s social responsibility practices also failed to adequately take into consideration a player’s age when analysing potential risk – one 18-year-old, who had only just created their account, was able to lose £4,000 in just eight minutes.

As for AML, L&L Europe were held not to have ‘appropriate’ measures in place to identify potential money laundering and terrorist financing risk, and they didn’t perform stringent enough due diligence checks to assess where an individual’s money was coming from when not proven by payslips or commercial income.

The regulator’s Sue Young said:

Withdrawal Woes

At Casinolyze, we have analysed the payout speeds and withdrawal mechanisms of a handful of the L&L Europe brands.

We were surprised by how slow some of them were in handling withdrawal requests. For example, Pub Casino took more than a week to complete our Visa payout, while All British Casino also needed a week just to satisfy our Revolut request.

This is significantly slower than fast withdrawal casinos we have tested.

Hopefully, the sizable fine they have received will act as the necessary wake-up call.