Stolen Money Being Used to Gamble Led to Fine
Petfre (Gibraltar) Limited will pay a £2.87m penalty for social responsibility and anti-money laundering failures after an investigation by the Gambling Commission revealed stolen money was used to gamble with, in incidents dating back almost 5 years.
An investigation into the operator (Petfre), which runs Betfred and Oddsking, revealed there were no controls in place to prevent “large levels of high velocity spend by new customers.” Social responsibility failures included £70K being spend in just a 10-hour period by a new customer, on the day of registration.
The results of the investigation also discovered that the safer gambling interaction triggers were set too high, and when customers increased their spend, no safer gambling review was conducted, or it wasn’t done quick enough. A single customer deposited £20,700 and lost £10,700 before any communication was triggered. The next interaction did not come until four months later when that same customer had deposited £323,715 and lost £69,371.
Old Rules – New Fines
The Commission found that between October 2019 and December 2020 the Licensee (Betfred Bingo) Petfre:
- breached paragraph 1, 2 and 3 of licence condition 12.1.1 – Anti-Money Laundering (Prevention of money laundering and terrorist financing)
- breached paragraph 1 of licence condition 12.1.2. – Anti-Money Laundering (Measures for operators based in foreign jurisdictions)
- failed to comply with paragraph 1 and 2 of social responsibility code of practice (SRCP) 3.4.1 – Customer Interaction
- failed to act in accordance with ordinary code provision 2.1.1 – Anti-money laundering
Due to this, the Gambling Commission has imposed a financial penalty of £2,873,750 million under section 121 of the Gambling Act 2005 (the Act) and has imposed a warning under section 117(1)(a) of the Act.
Leanne Oxley, Gambling Commission Director of Enforcement and Intelligence, said: “This is a further example of us taking action to investigate and sanction alarming failures. We expect this gambling business and all other licensees to review this case and look closely to see if they need to make further improvements to demonstrate active compliance. Where standards do not improve, tougher enforcement will follow.”
A Betfred spokesperson said: “We will work with the UK Gambling Commission and continually review all our anti-money laundering and social responsibility policies. During our assessment, the commission found no evidence of criminal activity. We remain committed to providing a safer gambling environment for our customers.”
This isn’t the first time the operator has been fined. Cast your minds back to 2019, we reported that the UKGC had fined Betfred’s owner for failing to carry out adequate source of funds checks (SOF/KYC) on a customer who able to deposit £210K before losing £140K. And this happened in just a 12-day period in November 2017. The money used to gamble with in such a short period of time was in fact stolen.
Source: “Petfre (Gibraltar) Ltd – Trading As Betfred and Oddsking – Fined £2.9m”. Gambling Commission. September 28, 2022.
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Comments (1)
TinTinn
10/07/22, 07:10:45 AM
It’s great to see that operators are being fined for past practices. It was very different a few years ago – you don’t have to prove income as much as you do now, but they should have still played by the rules. I suspect there will be a lot more fines for old practices to come.
