UKGC Issues Fine to Online Operator Gamesys Operations Ltd.

Gamesys Operations Limited, which manages 16 online gambling websites involving doublebubblebingo.com, ballycasino.co.uk, megawayscasino.com and jackpotjoy.com, must pay a fine of £6 million to the UK Gambling Commission for breaching Anti-Money  Laundering (AML) laws and lack of social responsibility.

UKGC’s lawsuit:

The firm is required to go through a third-party audit in the near future to make sure it is productively applying its safer gambling and AML policies, controls and procedures. In addition, these failings were discovered throughout the Commission compliance assessment during May two years ago, aka in 2022.

On a related note, the UK Gambling Commission asserted that in terms of failures in fight against money laundering, the operator is responsible for:

• having a ‘Reinvestment of winnings policy’ which was insufficient to mitigate the risk that deposited funds could be from illegitimate sources and not just from previous winnings.
• in certain circumstances, some customers were able to evade some of the Licensee’s AML triggers/thresholds and go on to spend significant sums without AML checks being conducted – one customer deposited £14,585 in a 28 week period, another deposited £18,884 in just over six months and another deposited £34,280 in five and a half months
• conducting inadequate customer due diligence and being over-reliant on third party information (such as internet research) or the customer’s verbal assurances for a number of customers, including one who deposited over £25,000 in three months, another who deposited over £58,000 in six months, and another who deposited over £65,000 in six months

However, that’s not all; because there are also failures of social responsibility such as:

• having a system of deposit limits which, for some customers, did not identify risks of harm quickly enough – no risks were identified when one customer deposited £8,255 within three days of opening an account, another lost £5,968 within five weeks of opening account and another lost £17,482 within 34 days of opening an account
• not always identifying customers at risk of experiencing harms associated with gambling by:
  • placing inappropriate reliance on checks which indicate whether a customer had a historical individual voluntary arrangement or been bankrupt or insolvent as a sign of gambling harm

Additionally, some examples of the aforementioned social responsibility failures are:

• carrying out only one responsible gambling interaction with a consumer who lost £19,709 over five months
• records of interactions, considerations, and rationale for decisions were not always recorded in sufficient detail, despite this being specified in the Licensee’s responsible gambling procedures
• only interacting with one customer once they had lost almost £10,000, and that ‘responsible gambling interaction’ involved the recommendation of new games and promotions

The violations took place during the time frame between November 2021 and July 2022.

Always up to the task:

Commenting on the fine, Executive Director of Operations, Kay Roberts, commented according to the official press release: “Our focus as a regulator is to ensure that operators are employing policies and procedures which make gambling fair, safe and crime-free.

“We take this responsibility extremely seriously and whenever we find failures in policies and procedures then the business can expect significant regulatory action.”