Admiral Casino owner hit with £1m anti-money laundering fine from Gambling Commission

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Greentube Alderney, the parent company of Admiral Casino, has been hit with a £1m fine for anti-money laundering and social responsibility failures. It is the second time the company has been fined by the UK Gambling Commission (UKGC) with the operator receiving a £685,000 fine in December 2021. 

The UKGC, responsible for overseeing the gambling market, meted out the £1m fine for various failures that occurred between September 2022 and June 2023. According to a public statement by the Commission, anti-money laundering failures included:

• Not scrutinising sensitive financial data when handed to the company. One client submitted a bank statement showing complex financial transactions culminating in a negative bank balance. It took the operator four months to properly investigate the statement. 
• Not investigating links between multiple accounts that were likely owned by the same person. The Commission saw evidence of links between the names and addresses of two separate accounts belonging to a player with previous convictions for supplying class-A drugs.
• Not following its own policy regarding risky occupations. In at least one instance, an account holder was shown to hold a position that meant they had access to third-party funds and had the potential to use these funds for their own gambling. 

Furthermore, the company also showed several failings regarding its social responsibility requirements:

• Company agents did not follow the company’s own checks to ensure the legitimacy of provided documents, enhancing the risk of fraud.
• Players meeting certain risk factors were not highlighted as being high-risk. Subsequently, they were allowed to deposit higher amounts than they should have been able to. 

The company has agreed to pay the £1m to socially responsible causes and the UKGC has said that it will continue to monitor the performance and actions of Greentube Alderney to ensure future compliance. 

The operator’s failings were very similar to those reported when Greentube Alderney was handed a fine in 2021. The UKGC has said that it will continue to monitor the situation with the commission director of enforcement, John Pierce, saying: “This case arose from a follow-up compliance assessment designed to ensure the operator had continued to apply lessons learned from previous regulatory action.”

This is the UKGC’s first fine of 2025. Last year, the Commission handed out just £6.6m in fines, down considerably from £214.2m from 2023. The majority of that money came from a single £6m penalty handed to Gamesys on 10 January; also for social responsibility and anti-money laundering failures. 

Gamesys’s fine was substantially higher than today’s because the operator runs 16 online gambling websites and multiple failures were witnessed across its portfolio.

According to a recent report, total fines by global regulators reached nearly £150m, down 73.3% compared to 2023’s £360m, with 70 fines last year compared to 96 the year before.

Additionally, Spain’s Ministry for Consumer Affairs handed out the most fines of any national authority last year, in the world, totalling the equivalent of just over £55m.