UK Gambling Commission Settles with bet365 for £582,120 Over Compliance Failures

The UK Gambling Commission has fined bet365 £582,120 for failing to meet anti-money laundering (AML) and social responsibility requirements during a March 2022 compliance assessment. This penalty underscores the regulator’s dedication to ensuring operators uphold high standards in the industry, following similar fines imposed on other operators.

Gambling Commission fines bet365 and Hillside for compliance failures

A new move by the UK Gambling Authority has lagged the bet365 operator £582,120 for violations connected with AM and social representation policies. Next to Hillside (UK Gaming), £343,035, and Hillside (UK Sports), £239,085, have been sanctioned. Among these penalties are the ones that were disclosed to the public after the company’s subjection to the assessment carried out by the Commission in March 2022, and which exposed several irregularities.

Using declaring AML shortcomings, the investigation exposed absent financial sanction checks on new players, lack of capabilities in effective KYC and customer due diligence procedures, and insufficiency in registering customer risk procedures. From the social concern side, weaknesses were seen in the delivery of customer journeys, which succeeded in curbing harm less effectively when applied, customer understanding evaluation inconclusively, and the ESRDS, which became ‘not demonstrably effective.’

Gambling Commission’s Enforcement Actions

The Executive Director of Operations for Kay Roberts’ Commission expressed the position of the Commission by indicating that standards enforcement must be a sine qua non for the provision of safe gaming, fairness, and crime prevention. Nevertheless, the identification and remediation of the policy and procedural failures remain essential, even though they do not show themselves in the same way as some problems that were highlighted in the previous events.

Among the other hefty fines should be mentioned, £6 million fine, which Gamesys got at the beginning of the year because of the very similar AML and social responsibility violations, and £3.25 million penalty, which Betfred received in the middle of summer. Apart from this, the HMRC fined Entain a whopping £585 million last August for not complying with Section 7 of the Bribery Act of 2010. Additionally, the entain’s previous chairman, Barry Gibson envisages a future without him.