Australia
AUSTRAC Takes Ladbrokes and Neds’ Operator – Entain – to Federal Court Over Serious Non-compliance with Australia’s Money Laundering Laws
AUSTRAC commenced civil penalty proceedings in the Federal Court against Entain Group Pty Ltd (Entain), which operates online betting sites including Ladbrokes, Neds and other online betting brands. The proceedings allege serious and systemic non-compliance with Australia’s anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism financing (AML/CTF) laws.
AUSTRAC CEO Brendan Thomas said the agency considers there were systemic failures in Entain’s approach to its AML/CTF obligations.
“AUSTRAC’s proceedings allege that Entain did not develop and maintain a compliant anti-money laundering program and failed to identify and assess the risks it faced. We are alleging this left the company at serious risk of criminal exploitation.
“Money laundering is often a symptom of serious criminal activity, including fraud, scams and corruption, all of which have equally serious effects on our communities,” he said.
AUSTRAC’s allegations include that:
• Entain’s board and senior management did not have appropriate oversight of its AML/CTF program, which limited its ability to identify the ML/TF risks it faced and its vulnerability to criminal exploitation.
• Entain operated a 24/7 business through its website and app, which created risks that persons unknown to Entain could access and use Entain’s betting platform including through third party providers.
• Third parties, including businesses and individuals, accepted cash and other deposits on behalf of Entain to be credited into betting accounts in ways that could obscure the proceeds of crime. Cash is less transparent than other forms of money and is at higher risk of being the proceeds of crime.
• Entain did not have appropriate controls to confirm the identity of customers making these deposits and the source of this money.
• Entain did not conduct appropriate checks on 17 higher risk customers, including examples where Entain did not appropriately deal with the risk that its online betting sites were being exploited by criminals to spend the proceeds of serious crime. This includes allegations that Entain deliberately obscured the identity of some high risk customers, on its own systems, through the use of pseudonyms to “protect their privacy”.
“This is the first time AUSTRAC has brought civil penalty proceedings against businesses operating in the online betting sector, and the Australian arm of Entain is part of one of the world’s largest sports betting and gaming groups,” Mr Thomas said.
“The online betting sector, and all other businesses regulated by AUSTRAC, must take their AML/CTF obligations seriously. This includes ensuring they have appropriate procedures to know who their customer is, even when they rely on third parties to process transactions.”
The action taken is part of AUSTRAC’s ongoing work focussed on gambling businesses in Australia to fight money laundering opportunities in the gambling industry. Following the Federal Court ordering Crown pay $450million in penalties over 2 years in 2023, this year AUSTRAC has seen the Federal Court order SkyCity to pay $63M penalty for breaches to the AML/CTF Act, accept an enforceable undertaking from Sportsbet, continue the Federal Court case against Star and are continuing the regulatory focus on a number of other gambling entities across Australia.
Additionally, the launch of the money laundering National Risk Assessment this year highlighted the highly exposed nature and vulnerability to money laundering online betting agencies face. This valuable resource has been developed support business better understand and develop appropriate measures to mitigate their risks.
It is now a matter for the Federal Court of Australia to determine whether Entain contravened the Act and, if so, what orders to make. AUSTRAC will not provide further comment on this enforcement action while the matter is before the Court.
Non-confidential Court documents related to the Entain matter will be available on the enforcement actions taken page in due course.
“AUSTRAC continues to actively driving out money laundering opportunities in Australia’s gambling industry and we’ll be tireless in our efforts to remove the ability for criminal to use our financial system to their own gain,” Mr Thomas said.
The post AUSTRAC Takes Ladbrokes and Neds’ Operator – Entain – to Federal Court Over Serious Non-compliance with Australia’s Money Laundering Laws appeared first on European Gaming Industry News.
Australia
Feedback Sought on How Public Lotteries are Run in NSW
Liquor & Gaming NSW is seeking feedback from industry, stakeholders and the community on how public lotteries are run in NSW.
The Public Lotteries Regulation 2016 is due to expire on 1 September 2026 and Liquor & Gaming NSW intends to renew the regulation to support the legislative framework for lottery regulation, while ensuring it remains fit for purpose.
Public consultation is a key part of the process and the draft Public Lotteries Regulation 2026 and Regulatory Impact Statement will be open for consultation until Friday 10 July.
It is proposed that the regulation will retain most of the existing provisions with some minor amendments to modernise the regulatory framework, remove outdated provisions and improve clarity, consistency and effectiveness.
Before the draft regulation can be remade, legislation requires a formal process of review be undertaken, which includes consultation with the public, interest groups and industry or businesses likely to be affected by the draft regulation.
It’s important for public lotteries to be conducted properly and in line with community interests and expectations, with appropriate harm minimisation measures.
The regulation supports the legislation by setting the standards around the conduct of public lotteries and puts in place consumer protections for people who buy lottery tickets.
The post Feedback Sought on How Public Lotteries are Run in NSW appeared first on EE Gaming | Global iGaming & Tech Intelligence Hub.
Australia
Former Star Entertainment Executives Mathias Bekier and Paula Martin Disqualified and Ordered to Pay Penalties
The Australian Federal Court has disqualified former Star Entertainment Group Limited executives Mathias Bekier and Paula Martin from managing corporations for six and seven years respectively and ordered them to pay pecuniary penalties for breaching their duties by failing to properly manage serious risks at one of Australia’s major casinos.
The Court ordered:
Mr Bekier, the former Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director, to pay a pecuniary penalty of $700,000 and disqualified him from managing corporations for six years.
Ms Martin, the former General Counsel, Company Secretary, and Chief Legal and Risk Officer, to pay a pecuniary penalty of $400,000 and disqualified her from managing corporations for seven years.
His Honour also ordered that Mr Bekier and Ms Martin pay 45% of ASIC’s costs of the proceeding.
The Court previously found that both Mr Bekier and Ms Martin breached their duties owed to Star Entertainment in relation to their handling of the risks associated with money laundering and criminal activity.
ASIC Chair Sarah Court said: “senior executives have a critical responsibility to identify, escalate and properly manage serious risks within their organisations.
“These failures occurred in a highly regulated environment and contributed to significant governance breakdowns at Star.
“Penalties of this scale reflect the seriousness of their conduct and send a strong message to other senior executives of listed companies that failures of this type are unacceptable.”
ASIC has an enduring enforcement priority focused on governance and directors’ duties failures.
In relation to Mr Bekier, His Honour Justice Lee said:
“Senior executives of casino operators, and public companies conducting enterprises pregnant with risks more broadly, must understand that failures of the kind established by the contraventions may attract substantial personal consequences.”
Further, in respect of Ms Martin he found that “the community is entitled to expect that a solicitor occupying such positions and having such responsibilities, within one of Australia’s largest casino operators, will display professional independence, accuracy and judgment of a high order. The conduct established … represented a very serious departure from those standards” and that
“Ms Martin knew of a miscellany of alarming information pertaining to [an overseas gambling junket] … She was required to report such matters to the Board but failed to do so. This is all the more concerning when considered against the backdrop of Ms Martin being the most senior solicitor employed by Star”; and that
“The more pervasive the failures of governance and culture become, the greater the obligation upon those entrusted with legal and risk responsibilities to insist upon compliance with legal obligations and proper standards of corporate conduct.”
The post Former Star Entertainment Executives Mathias Bekier and Paula Martin Disqualified and Ordered to Pay Penalties appeared first on EE Gaming | Global iGaming & Tech Intelligence Hub.
Anthony Woods
PointsBet Goes All In on Grafana Cloud to Power AI-Driven Observability at Scale
Grafana Labs, the company behind the open observability cloud, announced that PointsBet, one of Australia’s fastest-growing digital wagering operators, has selected Grafana Cloud as its unified observability platform. PointsBet is using Grafana Cloud to consolidate telemetry across its proprietary betting platform, accelerate incident resolution with AI-powered insights and give engineering teams the visibility they need to own and operate their services with confidence.
“Our platform is our product. Grafana Cloud gives us one place to see everything — and the AI tools to act on it fast,” Daniel Lucas, CTO at PointsBet.
Grafana Cloud was selected for its ability to deliver:
• Unified Observability Across Every Data Source: PointsBet’s proprietary platform spans real-time odds calculation, player account management, front-end apps and a custom-built betting engine, all generating high-volume telemetry from multiple sources. With Grafana Cloud, PointsBet can ingest and correlate metrics, logs, traces and profiles in a single open platform, ending the fragmentation that slows incident response. Built on OpenTelemetry and open source foundations including Grafana Loki, Grafana Tempo and Prometheus, there’s no vendor lock-in — just a unified view of the stack. This flexibility is what enables PointsBet’s shift towards a true service ownership model: engineering teams can now observe, understand and act on what they build.
• AI That’s Actually Useful: Grafana Assistant gives PointsBet engineers a context-aware AI co-pilot for investigation and troubleshooting, letting them query telemetry in natural language, navigate dashboards and trace issues to root cause without deep expertise in PromQL, LogQL or TraceQL. Now generally available in Grafana Cloud, Grafana Assistant can run multi-step incident investigations, generate and refine queries on the fly, and surface the right data at the right moment — keeping every action inside the tools teams already use. For a business where live betting windows close in seconds, reducing time-to-resolution isn’t a nice-to-have; it’s a competitive edge.
• Application Observability That Empowers Developers: Grafana Cloud Application Observability provides PointsBet’s teams with end-to-end visibility into how their services perform — surfacing service dependency maps, latency hotspots and the customer impact of every change. By connecting distributed traces, metrics and logs in a unified view, Application Observability helps teams understand not just that something broke, but why and who is affected.
“Observability used to mean drowning in dashboards, alert noise and waiting for someone else to tell you what’s on fire. We chose Grafana Cloud because it brings technology and commercial teams together on the single view building autonomous value streams — and Grafana Assistant means our engineers spend less time asking ‘what’s wrong’ and more time fixing it. It enables the shift from reactive firefighting to teams that genuinely own their services end to end and that helps us build a platform our customers can reliably bet on,” said Saurabh Vyas, Head of SRE, PointsBet.
“Real-time platforms at scale are some of the hardest systems to operate — every component has to perform under pressure, and every signal matters when something goes wrong. PointsBet’s engineering team has built a sophisticated platform, and we’re proud to give their engineers the observability foundation they need to operate it. Open, AI-powered, and built to cut through complexity — that’s exactly what Grafana Cloud is for,” said Anthony Woods, co-founder of Grafana Labs.
The post PointsBet Goes All In on Grafana Cloud to Power AI-Driven Observability at Scale appeared first on EE Gaming | Global iGaming & Tech Intelligence Hub.
-
Australia5 days agoFormer Star Entertainment Executives Mathias Bekier and Paula Martin Disqualified and Ordered to Pay Penalties
-
CFTC6 days agoNovig Secures CFTC Designation, Bringing the First Prediction Market Built for Sports Fans Nationwide
-
LatAm6 days agoInnovative payment solutions provider teams up with leading LATAM fintech platform to expand digital wallet access for online betting customers in Mexico
-
Alberta6 days agoMediaTroopers lines up eight operator partners ahead of Alberta launch
-
Alberta6 days agoWhy Alberta Represents the Next Major Growth Opportunity for Gaming Operators
-
Alina Mihaela Popa Chief Commercial Officer at ICONIC216 days agoICONIC21 launches live casino and RNG titles with Maxbet in Romania
-
Aviator Studio7 days agoAviator Studio Secures Significant Legal Victory in Brazil as Federal Court Suspends Spribe’s Aviator Trademark Rights
-
ATG6 days agoATG Casino player in Sweden wins €2m jackpot powered by EveryMatrix



