Ontario Regulator Fines Great Canadian Casino Toronto C$120,000 After Dealers Cheated With Patrons

Ontario's gaming regulator has fined the operator of Great Canadian Casino Resort Toronto C$120,000 (about US$88,000) after finding that the property's surveillance and internal controls failed to catch two table dealers who colluded with a group of gamblers to cheat the house out of nearly C$20,000 (about US$14,600) in under a week. The Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario (AGCO) issued the monetary penalty against Ontario Gaming GTA Limited Partnership, the registered operator of the Toronto casino, after a compliance review that turned up repeated oversight failures. The action lands as Ontario's regulated market, which took in C$98.3 billion in wagers across 2025, faces rising pressure to show that a fast-growing gaming sector can police the integrity of its own tables.

The case grew out of a criminal investigation. The Ontario Provincial Police Investigation and Enforcement Bureau, a unit embedded with the AGCO, charged five individuals in March 2024 after alleging that two of the casino's table games dealers worked with a set of patrons across multiple sessions. According to the regulator, the dealers intentionally exposed cards that were meant to stay face down, overdrew the dealer's hand when it suited their accomplices, and overpaid winning wagers to the group. A follow-up compliance review confirmed the cheating happened on more than one occasion with the same patrons, producing close to C$20,000 in improper winnings in less than seven days.

What the AGCO says the casino missed

The regulator's finding is aimed at the operator, not the individual cheats. The AGCO concluded that the casino's surveillance team and its pit supervisors failed to detect the scheme despite repeated chances to spot it, and that staff did not follow the required table games audit procedures built to catch exactly this kind of dealer misconduct. The commission also flagged that this is the second recent dealer-collusion incident at the Toronto property, which sharpened its scrutiny of the site's internal controls.

"Ontario's registered casino operators have an obligation to ensure the integrity of game play in their casinos," AGCO chief executive and registrar Dr. Karin Schnarr said in the statement announcing the penalty. "This includes a responsibility to detect and prevent collusion and cheating." Great Canadian did not contest the framing. Company spokesperson Chuck Keeling told CityNews that the operator maintains a zero-tolerance policy for any conduct that could compromise game integrity.

Under Ontario's process, a monetary penalty is not the final word. Ontario Gaming GTA Limited Partnership has the right to appeal the order to the Licence Appeal Tribunal (LAT), an independent adjudicative body within Tribunals Ontario, within 15 days of being served. No public decision on an appeal had been announced as of early July 2026, so the C$120,000 figure stands for now.

A pattern at one operator, and a bigger enforcement signal

The penalty is small against the balance sheet behind it. Great Canadian Entertainment runs 25 gaming, entertainment and hospitality properties across Ontario, British Columbia, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, and has been owned by funds managed by affiliates of Apollo Global Management since September 2021, when Apollo took the company private at C$45 per share in a deal valued at roughly C$3.3 billion (about US$2.4 billion). Set against Ontario's regulated online-gaming market alone, which generated about C$4 billion in operator revenue in 2025, the roughly C$20,000 the dealers skimmed is a rounding error. The point of the AGCO's action is not recovery. It is holding the operator responsible for the controls that are supposed to make cheating detectable in the first place.

That message is easier to read next to the AGCO's other recent move against the same company. On July 7, 2026, the regulator ordered C$170,000 in penalties against Great Canadian Entertainment for failing to adequately identify and report potential money laundering at Pickering Casino Resort, a separate Ontario property. The AGCO found the operator did not properly monitor high-risk patrons and did not file the suspicious-transaction reports required when players showed indicators of the kind of casino money-laundering failures that regulators abroad have punished with far larger fines. Two enforcement actions against one operator inside three months, one on game integrity and one on financial-crime controls, describe a regulator applying steady pressure on the compliance side of a maturing market.

For operators and the affiliates that route players to Ontario's licensed sites, the enforcement record matters because the market's pitch rests on being the safe, regulated alternative to offshore books. Ontario built that market on the promise of integrity, and the AGCO is now spending penalties to defend it. The regulator's own framing puts the burden on the operator: individual employees may cheat, but the licensed business is expected to have surveillance, auditing and compliance systems that catch them. That expectation is the same one now surfacing across the industry, from casino money-laundering enforcement in Australia to the widening US probes into wagering integrity in sports, and it raises the operational cost of holding a licence in every market that sells itself on trust.

The immediate question is procedural. Ontario Gaming GTA Limited Partnership can still take the C$120,000 order to the Licence Appeal Tribunal, and the outcome there will show how much room a registered operator has to contest a penalty that turns on what its surveillance team should have seen. Until it files, the fine stands and the property carries a second dealer-collusion finding on its compliance record.