William Hill

William Hill's UK licence carries a history that a new customer should know before reading the 4.7 App Store rating. On 28 March 2023 the Gambling Commission announced that William Hill group businesses would pay £19.2 million for social-responsibility and anti-money-laundering failures — the largest enforcement payment the Commission had ever imposed — of which £12.5 million fell on WHG (International) Limited, the Gibraltar company that runs williamhill.com. The Commission's own examples: a customer allowed to open an account and spend £23,000 in 20 minutes with no checks; another allowed to lose £54,252 in four weeks with no evidence of income sought. Its chief executive said the failings were "so widespread and alarming" that licence suspension was seriously considered. Two years later, on 7 August 2025, the register records a further £82,687 penalty against WHG for failing to identify customers holding multiple accounts across group companies.

None of that means the product is bad, and the evidence says it is not. The UK app rates 4.7 from 199,000 ratings, and the ten App Store reviews quoted here split four four-star, two five-star, three one-star and one each at two and three. The praise is for presentation — "attractive schematics and colours with clear text fonts" — and for free bets; the eleventh review, an affiliate editorial, credits it with "some of the highest betting limits anywhere". The complaints are about the interface being confusing, cited three times, and about the app being unreliable, twice. Nobody in this sample complains about being paid.

WHG's licence — 039225-R-319373-015, active since November 2014 for casino, betting, bingo, pool and software — is intact and current, and that is the point of the 2023 story: the Commission chose a record fine over suspension because the operator co-operated and fixed what it found. A UK customer today gets GamStop, affordability checks and an independent dispute route, and an operator that has been through the largest compliance overhaul in the industry's history.

This site's description of William Hill as "now owned by 888 Holdings" is out of date — 888 renamed itself in 2024 — but the ownership is not sourced here and the sentence is left for a reader to check. William Hill is the bookmaker your parents used, now with a compliance record they did not have to think about. Read the 2023 findings, then decide whether the cleaned-up version deserves your account.