EuroMillions operator fined €60,000 for ‘serious and systemic’ breaches of anti-money laundering rules

European Lotto and Betting Limited (ELBL), the Malta-licensed bookmaker behind the Lottoland betting operation, has agreed to a €61,607 settlement with Malta's Financial Intelligence Analysis Unit (FIAU) after it found “serious and systematic” deficiencies in the company's anti-money laundering controls.

Lottoland is an international online gambling company with a significant Malta presence, allowing customers to bet on the outcomes of major lotteries such as EuroMillions, with Malta-registered ELBL serving as the bookmaker behind the operation.

The settlement follows a compliance examination carried out in 2022. The FIAU identified shortcomings in the company's customer risk assessments, customer profiling, transaction monitoring and politically exposed person (PEP) screening.

The case comes against a wider legal and regulatory backdrop for the Malta-based companies behind Lottoland, including a 2026 Court of Justice of the European Union ruling concerning their provision of online gambling services to a German customer.

The case involved ELBL and Deutsche Lotto-und Sportwetten Limited, both Malta-based companies holding licences issued by the Malta Gaming Authority. They offered online virtual slot-machine games and betting on lottery results to customers in Germany.

Separately, Lottoland Limited faced a German tax claim of around €9.8 million in VAT, while ELBL has also been involved in a European trademark dispute concerning the Powerball name. The wider Lottoland group has faced regulatory challenges in other markets, including Australia and the United Kingdom.

The FIAU's examination found that ELBL was operating two customer risk-assessment processes — one manual and one automated — but said both were inadequate.

The automated system used gaming activity data with limited historical coverage and restrictive scoring, which the FIAU said made higher-risk classifications difficult to reach.

The FIAU said the company had not always collected sufficient information to establish comprehensive customer profiles and that its approach to expected customer activity relied too heavily on predetermined thresholds and economic indicators applied uniformly across its customer base.

The regulator also said transaction monitoring was mainly driven by predefined thresholds, despite requirements for enhanced scrutiny of complex, unusually large or otherwise unusual transactions. Among the customer files reviewed, the FIAU identified indicators including high transaction volumes, sudden deposit spikes, multiple payment methods and transactions involving third-party accounts.

Despite those indicators, the FIAU said enhanced reviews and adequate source-of-wealth and source-of-funds assessments were not consistently carried out.

The FIAU initially imposed an administrative penalty of €94,780, together with a follow-up directive. That amount was subsequently reduced by 35% under the FIAU's settlement framework, resulting in a final penalty of €61,607.

Among the changes, ELBL replaced its two risk-assessment methodologies with a single documented framework covering customer, geographical, product, payment, transaction and interface risks.

The FIAU also found instances where PEP screening had not taken place within the required timeframe after customers reached the €2,000 deposit threshold. The company attributed this to a configuration error in its screening reports, which it said had subsequently been corrected.

In a recent investigation, German researcher Lilith Wittmann alleged that internal Lottoland documents suggest the German state and charitable causes may have lost almost €400 million between 2019 and 2023 through the company's lottery-betting operations.

Ms Wittmann's investigation also examined how Lottoland expanded its German operations despite the country's state lottery monopoly, including its acquisition of the German lottery website Lottohelden in 2015 and the subsequent restructuring of its business around lottery betting.

Ms Wittmann also alleges that internal ELBL documents show Germany accounted for around 95 per cent of the company's revenue in the first half of 2020, highlighting the extent of the Malta-based bookmaker's exposure to the German market. Lottoland disputes the claim that more than 90 per cent of ELBL's revenue came from Germany.