The UK Gambling Commission has issued a formal warning to B2B supplier Spribe for failing to adequately uphold requirements linked to the prevention of criminal activity, the latest regulatory action against the Aviator developer in less than six months.
The warning, issued under section 117(1)(a) of the Gambling Act 2005, follows the Commission’s finding that Spribe operated without the appropriate hosting licence between 28 May 2021 and 30 October 2025 – a period spanning more than four years. The regulator determined that this unauthorised activity undermined the licensing objective under section 1(a) of the Act, which requires that gambling not be a source of crime or used to support it.
Spribe OÜ has held a UK remote gambling software licence (account 57302) since December 2020, but its model of hosting its own games required a separate remote casino game host operating licence that it did not hold. When the Commission suspended Spribe’s licence on 30 October 2025 on grounds of suitability, it ordered all hosting activity in Great Britain to cease immediately. Spribe publicly characterised the breach as a technical oversight at the time, stating it had not understood that its setup required an additional permission beyond its software licence.
The Commission lifted the suspension on 30 March 2026 after Spribe obtained appropriate hosting permissions and took remedial steps. The formal warning issued now represents the concluded regulatory outcome of the section 116–118 review that ran alongside the suspension, and stops short of a financial penalty or renewed suspension. The regulator has made clear, however, that any further non-compliance would be assessed against Spribe’s existing warning record.
The Commission said Spribe had failed to “adequately uphold the requirements” linked to criminal activity prevention – the licensing objective that the extended period of unauthorised hosting directly engaged. No named official statement accompanied the published decision.
The action is the latest in a sustained sequence of UKGC enforcement outcomes targeting compliance gaps across both operators and B2B suppliers. The Commission earlier this year ordered NetBet to pay £650,000 following AML and social responsibility failures, and fined Platinum Gaming £10 million for comparable systemic shortcomings. The Spribe case extends that enforcement pattern into the B2B hosting chain, signalling that the Commission applies the same suitability and criminal-offence thresholds to software suppliers as it does to consumer-facing operators.
The case has drawn close attention from B2B suppliers and operators navigating the Commission’s evolving compliance framework around remote technical standards, particularly those whose hosting arrangements sit across multiple licence categories.
Source: EGR Global
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.