68% of Brits believe UK bookmakers use anti-money laundering (AML) and responsible gambling checks as pretexts to void winning bets or delay payouts, according to a new survey conducted by GamblingNews.uk.
The survey consisted of 316 British punters, and 215 of them agreed that some bookmakers attempt to use regulatory red-tape and mandated responsible gambling checks to avoid paying out winning bets.
76 of the surveyed punters, or 24%, said they believe unregulated bookmakers, including prediction markets platforms like Polymarket and Kalshi, and non-GAMSTOP casinos, are more trustworthy and reliable when it comes to paying out winning bets than regulated UK bookmakers despite the lower levels of regulation and protection.
98 of the punters surveyed by GamblingNews.uk (31%) said they had placed bets on unregulated casinos and sportsbooks, such as prediction markets platforms and platforms which do not hold a UK gambling licence, in the last 12 months.
Why are AML and Responsible Gambling Cechsks a Growing Concern?
The UK Gambling Commission has spent the past two years tightening the screws on operators through anti-money laundering checks and financial risk assessments — measures designed to catch problem gambling and dirty money before they do damage.
In principle, nobody disputes the goal. In practice, punters and campaigners increasingly complain that these same checks are being weaponised by bookmakers as a convenient reason to freeze accounts and delay or deny withdrawals.
The current framework requires operators to run background financial checks on customers, particularly around large deposits, rapid staking increases, or big wins. Regulators describe these checks as largely frictionless, claiming they touch only a small slice of active accounts. Officials have also gone out of their way to draw a line between these financial risk assessments and full-blown affordability checks, insisting the process isn’t meant to judge what a customer can afford to gamble at all, only to flag genuinely suspicious activity.
Yet the gap between regulatory intent and operator behaviour is where the trouble starts. Bookmakers sit on both sides of an obvious conflict: they’re required to flag suspicious financial activity, but they also have every incentive to slow-walk or refuse payouts on winning bets. A “review” triggered nominally for AML or source-of-funds purposes can just as easily become a stalling tactic when a customer has had a big win — with the account frozen, documents demanded, and no clear timeline for resolution.
Because these checks are opaque by design, customers often have no way to tell whether a hold is a genuine compliance flag or a discretionary decision dressed up as one.
Mental health and “customer interaction” checks add another layer. Operators are obliged to intervene when patterns suggest problem gambling, but the criteria for triggering an intervention are broad and largely left to the operator’s own judgement. That discretion can cut against the customer: rather than simply restricting future play, some operators have been accused of using welfare flags retroactively to justify withholding funds already won, reframing what is really a payout dispute as a “responsible gambling” matter.
The regulator’s own compliance data suggests the picture is patchy at best. Recent assessments have found recurring weaknesses across the industry in customer interaction practices, affordability assessments, and AML controls, with roughly a quarter of firms falling short of a satisfactory rating.
That failure rate matters: it’s precisely the operators with the weakest or most inconsistent processes who are best placed to apply checks selectively — thoroughly enough to justify a delay, loosely enough that legitimate customers rarely get a straight answer.
For punters, the practical advice is unglamorous but important: keep records of deposits and source-of-funds documentation, request the specific legal basis for any hold in writing, and escalate unresolved disputes to the Independent Betting Adjudication Service or the Gambling Commission itself if an operator won’t explain a delay. Regulation designed to protect players only works if it isn’t quietly repurposed as leverage against the very people it’s meant to protect.
