The UK Gambling Commission revealed it had seriously considered suspending Evolution’s UK operating licence following the discovery of significant anti-money laundering failings.
The regulator’s announcement came alongside Evolution’s previously confirmed £4.75 million settlement, adding important new context to the scale of the enforcement action taken.
Investigators found that Evolution’s live casino games were being offered through six websites accessible to British consumers that did not hold the relevant UK gambling licence.
Those six unlicensed websites were operated by two undisclosed operators who were supplying Evolution’s content to UK players without the required authorisation.
The Commission’s central criticism focused on Evolution’s risk assessment processes, which it said were not effective enough to identify that business partners were reaching unlicensed UK markets.
UKGC Director of Enforcement John Pierce stated: “This case exposed serious weaknesses in Evolution’s anti-money laundering risk assessment and its oversight of risks within its supply chain.”
Pierce added: “The company’s AML risk assessment was outdated and failed to adequately consider the risk of its games being made available through unlicensed operators.”
He concluded that “there was a significant gap between the controls on paper and their effectiveness in practice,” underscoring the severity of the compliance breakdown identified during the investigation.
The Commission found Evolution had breached licence condition 12.1.1(1) by failing to carry out an effective assessment of money laundering and terrorist financing risks across its supply chain.
UK consumers made large volumes of visits to those unlicensed sites between December 2023 and November 2024, before the regulator formally notified Evolution of the issue in December 2024.
Evolution acknowledged the flagged games were legitimate titles from its portfolio and subsequently moved to block UK access through the affected unlicensed websites.
In February 2025, the Stockholm-listed supplier announced plans to significantly increase technical controls and geoblocking across Europe to prevent content from reaching unlicensed operators.
Evolution CEO Martin Carlesund had previously expressed optimism that the investigation would conclude before the end of 2025, but later confirmed the company was “patiently waiting” for a regulatory response after receiving no communication from the UKGC since that summer.
The enhanced ring-fencing measures weighed on Evolution’s European performance throughout 2025, contributing to a decline in fourth-quarter net revenue to €514.2 million from €533.8 million in Q4 2024.
Full-year results also reflected the turbulence, with Evolution reporting flat net revenue of €2.07 billion, a 14.6% decline in profit to €1.1 billion, and a 9.2% decrease in EBITDA to €1.4 billion.
