Gambling Commission says casino AML failings rival online risks
A £5m settlement with Rank Group's Grosvenor casinos exposes anti-money laundering and safer-gambling lapses the regulator says are just as serious in betting shops and casinos as online.
Rank Group has agreed to pay more than £5 million after the Gambling Commission found serious anti-money laundering and safer-gambling failings across its land-based casino estate, iGaming Business reported.
The settlement, announced on Wednesday, covers three Rank subsidiaries: Grosvenor Casinos Limited, Grosvenor Casinos (GC) Limited and Gaming Group Limited, which between them run 51 casinos in Great Britain. The companies will pay £5,012,261 into the government's consolidated fund and have agreed to a third-party audit of their AML and social responsibility controls.
The case followed a Section 116 licence review under the Gambling Act 2005, triggered by reports and intelligence the regulator received about the operators. A targeted compliance assessment carried out in June 2025 uncovered weaknesses spanning both AML procedures and customer protection practice.
Investigators found the operators had not updated their AML policies to reflect the 2020 changes to the UK Money Laundering Regulations, leaving some customers wrongly classified as lower-risk than they should have been. Venue managers were found to be making discretionary calls without clear guidance, which meant verification of customer funds and sources of wealth was sometimes inadequate.
The Commission also flagged confusion over cryptocurrency as a source of funds. Staff treated crypto as acceptable once it had been converted into sterling bank deposits, without properly checking its provenance. Enhanced due diligence was at times skipped even where the operators' own policies required it, including for students from high-risk jurisdictions and customers showing unusual funding patterns.
On safer gambling, the report detailed specific cases of missed intervention. One customer lost around £50,000 with no recorded safer-gambling contact. Another, a long-standing customer, won roughly £260,000 and then lost £250,000 within 12 days without any protective interaction being logged. A separate returning customer lost £25,000 before any intervention took place.
The regulator said staff had relied on repeated low-level interventions without assessing whether they worked, and were slow to escalate to stronger measures such as deposit limits or restrictions on debit-card payments. These failings breached licence conditions and social responsibility code provisions, in particular the duty to stop gambling being used to facilitate crime.
Sue Young, the Gambling Commission's executive director of operations, said the case showed enforcement is not only an online gambling story. "Larger enforcement cases are often associated with online gambling but, as today's announcement shows, the risks of anti-money laundering and social responsibility failures are equally alive in the land-based sector," she said, and called on other retail operators to review their own compliance arrangements.
The regulator's 2026 risk assessment report on AML had already identified operator-side failings, including weak AML and counter-terrorist financing policies and poorly trained staff, as a recurring issue across multiple gambling subsectors.
Grosvenor Casinos said it had accepted the findings and the settlement. Rank Group told the market it had acted quickly to put corrective measures in place and had cooperated fully with the investigation, which the Commission said it took into account when deciding the size of the resolution. The group had already flagged a £5 million provision for the expected settlement in its 2025 full-year results.