Today (March 4th 2025) the UK Gambling Commission have published their latest regulatory action in relation to AG Communications Limited dba/Aspire Global!

The £1.4 million fine released today was in relation to Social Responsibility (SR) and Anti-Money Laundering (AML) failures.

This is the second time Aspire Global, who operate 48 UK Gambling websites via their White Label model, has faced regulatory action. On 14 November 2022 the Commission announced a financial penalty of £237,600 due to AML and Social Responsibility failures.

Social responsibility failures in the recent assessment included:

• not having effective systems in place to prevent customers spending significant amounts of money in a short period of time before an assessment was made as to whether the customer was potentially at risk of gambling related harm. This raised concern that velocity of spend was not identified or acted upon quickly enough.
• failing to conduct a safer gambling interaction despite one customer losing £6,000 in 48 hours. A telephone interaction was attempted but only when the daily loss limit of £5,000 in 24 hours was reached.
• one customer was able to deposit and lose £7,000 in just over four hours in the early hours. This customer was able to play through the backstop in place at the time due to a system error which failed to prevent the customer from depositing above the backstop limit. A manual review of the customer did not identify the fact they had played through the backstop trigger.
• one customer was able to open a significant number of gambling accounts despite the fact they had previously self-excluded.

Anti-money laundering failures included:

• AML/Counter Terrorist Financing (CTF) policies and procedures were too reliant on financial thresholds.
• when customers hit a medium, medium/high or high ML risk score they were not subject to a manual Enhanced Customer Due Diligence (ECDD) check until a financial trigger was hit.
• when financial thresholds were reached, there were delays in completing ECDD checks. One customer who reached the financial threshold did not have an ECDD review conducted until a week later.
• not following its policy regarding ECDD checks. One customer who reached a financial threshold but did not have a high AML risk score, did not have a manual ECDD review until eight days later. This was contrary to AG Communications Limited’s policy.

A few takeaways from this regulatory action;

• The UKGC will not be forgiving where system errors cause an Operator to not comply with their procedures.
• Self-exclusion should apply across all brands for multi-brand operators (see SR code 3.5.3-5, ‘all accounts’ is plural).
• EDD thresholds should be acted on in a timely manner.
• Where triggers and related actions are within policy, make sure they are adhered to, regardless of any mitigating factors!

John Pierce, Director of Enforcement, stated “This case marks the second occasion that this operator has been subject to enforcement action. Its failure to uphold anti-money laundering standards, delays in necessary interventions, and deficiencies in social responsibility measures are wholly unacceptable“.

Don’t forget that Luke – Audit, Risk and Compliance are the leading experts in remote gambling compliance, enforcement action and conducting independent audits which give an up to date reflection of the Commissions compliance assessments!

If you wish to discuss Gambling Commission Compliance assessments and the related requirements, feel free to Contact Us for a free consultation.