The Gambling Commission has had a busy summer. Six enforcement outcomes between
late June and the end of August, running from a supplier that could not time its
own games to two operators whose licences were switched off outright.
Here is the run of it, and what each one tells you about how the regulator is
currently thinking.
The biggest number
Evolution Malta Holding Limited agreed to pay £4.75 million on 23 July. Not
for anything it did to a British customer, but for where its games ended up.
The Commission found in August 2024 that five Evolution games were live on six
websites run by two unlicensed operators, and that British players had reached
them in large volumes. A licence review followed.
The message to suppliers is not subtle. You are responsible for the company
your product keeps, and “we only make the games” has stopped being an answer.
The ones about customers
Petfre (Gibraltar) Limited, which runs betfred.com, will pay £900,000 after a
review found its automated systems were not catching the markers of harm they
were supposed to catch.
The detail that stings is the seven-day gap. Accounts flagged for review kept
gambling while the review sat in a queue, and one customer lost £17,900 in 24
hours. “Diligent implementation of effective policies and procedures are the
cornerstones of safer gambling,” said John Pierce, the Commission’s director of
enforcement.
QuinnBet (Gibraltar) Limited followed on 20 August with £609,104, of which
£193,118 is disgorgement rather than penalty. The review covered March 2023 to
August 2025 and found anti-money-laundering and social responsibility failings.
One customer placed roughly 4,800 bets in a day and 7,000 the next without
anything flagging it for a human to look at. Customers aged 18 to 24 were also
allowed past the deposit limits the operator had set for that age group.
Then Holland Park Leisure Limited, £150,000 on 18 August, for not joining a
multi-operator self-exclusion scheme across its three adult gaming centres in
Leicester. That is a shop-floor failing rather than an online one, but the
aggravating factors are the story: it ignored the Commission’s advice that it
was non-compliant, and gave the regulator misleading information.
It joined a scheme only after its licence was suspended in October 2025. It
now faces a third-party audit as well.
Suspensions, and a stopwatch
On 28 August the Commission suspended the operating licences of BresBet Ltd
and Bet St George Ltd with immediate effect, opening reviews into suspected
social responsibility and anti-money-laundering failings.
Both must still let customers reach their accounts and withdraw. Neither can
trade normally again until the Commission is satisfied. Suspension is a serious
step and the regulator has been using it more readily.
The oddest case of the summer was the earliest. Stakelogic BV paid £122,835 on
25 June for running slots faster than the technical standards allow, which
require at least 2.5 seconds between the start of one game cycle and the next.
Stakelogic reported itself. One game ran at 1.97 seconds, and 15 more UK
titles missed the mark by anything from 0.675 seconds down to a single
thousandth of a second. The cause was that the company had been testing
compliance with a manual stopwatch.
It is comic right up until you notice the thread running through the summer.
Four of the six are failures of automation: systems that were supposed to notice
something and did not, in an industry that has spent a decade insisting the
machines have this covered.
One thing worth knowing before you get your hopes up. In QuinnBet’s case the
money goes into the government’s Consolidated Fund. A fine is not compensation,
and none of it reaches the customers the failings were about.
If you want the version of these rules that affects you at the reels, our
safe gambling guide
covers it, and our
UK online casinos guide
covers who is allowed to take your money in the first place.
Image: Victoria Square House, Birmingham, by Bs0u10e01, CC BY-SA 3.0.
18+. Gambling should be entertainment, not income. Long term the
house wins. Free and confidential help is at BeGambleAware.org.
