UK Gambling Commission says remote casinos are high ML and TF risk, with £5 billion remote casino GGY in 2024-2025

The Gambling Commission’s long-awaited 2026 risk assessment is fairly blunt about where the pressure points are: remote and non-remote casinos, plus betting, sit at the top of the money laundering (ML) and terrorist financing (TF) tree. For PSPs, the useful bit is not the label itself but the payment mix underneath it — e-wallets, pre-paid cards, cryptoasset-linked funds, and more complex payment chains are all called out as higher-risk features.

1. Drawing on data from 1 April 2023 to 31 October 2025, the Commission kept remote and non-remote casinos, alongside betting activities, in the highest-risk subsectors for ML and TF. Society lotteries and the National Lottery stayed in the low-risk bucket.
2. For April 2024 to March 2025, remote casino gross gambling yield (GGY) reached £5 billion, with slot games accounting for £4.2 billion. Remote betting generated £2.6 billion, while non-remote betting generated £2.5 billion, including only £28 million from on-course betting.
3. The Commission’s methodology uses a likelihood “x impact = risk” formula, which is why casino TF risk ended up at medium overall even though the nationwide National Risk Assessment classified casino TF risk as low. The Commission said it was weighing the potentially severe consequences of terrorist financing incidents.
4. Peer-to-peer gambling products, including poker and betting exchanges, were singled out as heightened ML risks. Poker was assigned a “high” overall ML risk in both remote and non-remote casino environments, while peer-to-peer betting was also treated as high risk, especially in remote betting.
5. The gambling software sector was upgraded from low to medium ML risk because of the cross-border nature of software supply and the risk of licensed software being resold or supplied to unlicensed operators. The report also flagged technical vulnerabilities in automatic ticket redemption systems in gaming machines and self-service betting terminals.

One line worth reading twice if you run payments or acquiring: the Commission said payment methods are a significant risk factor, and specifically highlighted the rising use of e-wallets, pre-paid cards and cryptoasset-linked funds in remote sectors. It also pointed to complex payment systems using multiple methods or open-loop structures, which, in plain English, give criminals more room to hide what is happening.