UK Gambling Commission Imposed Penalties Worth £4.5m

The UK’s regulatory body for online gambling has so far fined four licensed operators with penalties worth £4.5 million combined.

The state’s gambling commission continues its hunt for licensees who disobey the rules that are issued in the official set of regulations…

…and plans on being harsher than ever when it comes to financial punishments.

Which Companies Were Fined?

The biggest financial penalty was issued to InTouch Games, that was punished with a penalty of £2.2 million. Fines were also handed to Betit Operations Limited (£1.4 million), MT Secure Trade (£700,000) and BestBet Limited (£230,972).

The UK Gambling Commission said the fines had to be issued because the companies failed to safeguard against money laundering and protect consumers from gambling harm.

According to the Commission, InTouch Games had inadequate money laundering processes in place…

…and didn’t have adequate systems that would determine players’ sources of wealth.

The company also failed to be proactive in engaging with customers to mitigate the risk of harm. A perfect example of that is the fact that the company never questioned a customer whose wagers went from £200 to £10,000 per month in a short amount of time.

More Details

Also, Betit Operations, which operates the kaboo.com and highroller.com sites, was fined because it wasn’t making the difference between the risks related to different customers when conducting checks…

…with the company carrying out only soft credit checks and verification of names and addresses for all players.

The company also had poor interaction with customers and also one customer was allowed to deposit £110,000 over a period of 24-hours.

MT Secure Trading, which operates the sites, guts.com and rizk.com, was also penalized for money laundering and social responsibility failures.

MT took deposits of £38,000 from one customer without investigating the source of funds and later it was discovered that the money was stolen.

The Commission also punished in Bestbet Limited for not having an anti-money laundering and social responsibility procedures and controls.

Gambling Commission Being Very Active

The UKGC has been conducting a thorough analysis of the licensees in the online casino industry. It investigated over 120 operators during the past 18 months.

As a reminder, just last November, the regulator issued financial penalties worth £14 million in one month only.

Richard Watson, executive director at the Gambling Commission, said:

“We have been working hard to raise standards in the online industry to ensure that gambling is crime-free and that the one in five people in Britain who gamble online every month can do so safely.

“But our work will not stop here. As a regulator, we will continue to set and enforce standards that the industry must comply with to protect consumers.”

A Word from GIG’s CEO

Gaming Innovation Group (GiG) owns both Betit and MT SecureTrade.

The CEO of those companies, Robin Reed, had to give the official comment to the press regarding UK penalties.

“It has been such transparency and cooperation, which we are pleased that the Gambling Commission has publicly acknowledged, and agility to implement improvements that allowed us to avert a sanction,” he said.

“Commencing from the end of 2017, GiG has embarked on an ambitious journey to place player well-being, prevention of money laundering and sustainable business practices at the core of its operators.

“In the last two years, we have invested heavily in automated technology such as Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning enabling early prevention, monitoring, and other reporting tools.

“We have also invested in people, building our compliance and player safety teams and ensuring that the necessary tools are available to them to assist in their duties of reducing the risk of business being used to further financial crime and detecting and interacting with players who may be vulnerable or at risk of problem gambling,” he concluded.

Source:

“GC hands out financial penalties worth £4.5m”, igamingbusiness.com, May 15, 2019.