Three Rank Group PLC-owned casino operators will pay £5 million after a Gambling Commission investigation found anti-money laundering and social responsibility failures across their 51-casino estate in Great Britain.
The regulator announced the settlement on October 7, 2026, naming Grosvenor Casinos Limited, Grosvenor Casinos (GC) Limited and Gaming Group Limited. The three companies will also undergo a third-party audit to confirm they are implementing anti-money laundering and safer gambling policies, procedures and controls effectively.
The failures the Commission found
The Commission said the operators had not updated their anti-money laundering policies to reflect changes to the Money Laundering Regulations in 2020, six years before the settlement. It also found policies that allowed inconsistent decisions for customers with elevated money laundering risk, unclear controls that assigned inappropriate risk levels to high-risk customers, and enhanced customer due diligence checks that were skipped even when the operators’ own rules required them.
On the social responsibility side, the Commission cited a customer who lost £50,000 with no safer gambling interaction, a customer who won approximately £260,000 in a short period and then lost around £250,000 over 12 days with no record of any interaction, and a returning self-excluded customer who was not approached until they had lost £25,000.
A warning to the wider sector
Commission Executive Director of Operations Sue Young said the case shows land-based operators face the same scrutiny as online businesses.
“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,” Young said in the Commission’s announcement.
She added that premises-based operators should review this case and ensure they are not making the same mistakes, “and therefore they do not face costly and inevitable Commission action.”
All £5 million of the settlement will be directed to the Government’s Consolidated Fund, the Commission said, not to the affected customers.
Petra Vanhoof has spent the better part of a decade following the shifting tides of gambling regulation across Europe and beyond. She came up through the compliance side of the industry before pivoting to writing, which gives her a grounded, no-nonsense perspective on the rules, loopholes, and political maneuvering that shape how operators actually do business. She is particularly drawn to the gap between what regulators say and what the market ends up doing in response.