Furthermore, LeoVegas will be handed an official warning and become subject to an audit, to ensure the operator is correctly administering social responsibility and anti-money laundering protocols.
Gambling Commission Director of Enforcement and Intelligence, Leanne Oxley, commented on the punitive action: “We identified this through focused compliance activity and we will continue to take action against other operators if they do not learn the lessons our enforcement work is providing.
“This case is a further example of operators failing to protect customers and failing to be alive to money laundering risks within their business.”
The social responsibility failures LeoVegas has been charged included several points of note, for example setting six hours as the point at which customers were made to take a 45-minute cool-off period without explaining how they concluded that playing for six hours was the point at which harm would occur.
Meanwhile, the anti-money laundering breaches listed by The Gambling Commission included: financial triggers for anti-money laundering reviews being too high and unrealistic to effectively manage money laundering and terrorist financing risks; relying too heavily on ineffective threshold triggers and inadequate information regarding how much a customer should be allowed to spend based on their income or wealth, or any other risk factor.
A final point was that inappropriate controls allowed significant levels of gambling spend to take place within a short space of time without knowing anything about customers’ financial situations.
