Done Bros (Cash Betting) Limited, trading as Betfred, will pay £3.25m ($4.3m) for regulatory failures. The fine comes after a Commission investigation revealed social responsibility and anti-money laundering failures.
The social responsibility failures Betfred has been found guilty of breaching include having insufficient controls in place to protect new customers, and to monitor high-velocity spending and duration of play, exposing the customer to the risk of substantial losses without safer gambling interaction.
Betfred was found to have made assumptions that customers were not at risk of harm because they were winning players.
Additionally, it failed to carry out any safer gambling interactions on one customer who staked £517,499 over a two-month period; and showed a lack of evidence of evaluation of the effectiveness of individual customer interactions, as well as a lack of record keeping which limited the effectiveness of future interactions.
Regulatory failures related to anti-money laundering failures included: poor record keeping and financial alert thresholds being set too high; failing to consistently obtain appropriate ‘know your customer’ identification and Source of Funds (SoF) documentation from its customers when its thresholds were met; placing an undue reliance on open-source information and not taking further steps to corroborate customers’ SoF information.
These failings occurred over various periods between January 2021 and December 2022.
Kay Roberts, Executive Director of Operations at the Gambling Commission, said: “In recent years, there’s been a public focus on online gambling but this case illustrates how important it is for us to continue our drive to raise standards across the whole industry.
“Gambling is a legitimate leisure activity enjoyed safely by millions but it is vital that every single operator, either online or offline, has in place effective safeguards to prevent harm or crime.”
