UKGC Issues £9.4M Fine on 888 UK Limited for AML and Social Responsibility Omissions

The UK Gambling Commission (UKGC) has just issued a fine of £9.4 m on 888 UK Limited for breaching the social responsibility and anti-money laundering rules.

888 UK Limited, which runs 78 sites such as 888.com, has also gotten an official warning and will have to go through separate auditing.

The penalty is yet another for the company after it went under enforcement action by the UK Gambling Commission in 2017. As a reminder, the brand faced a £7.8 million fine due to its failure to keep safe vulnerable players.

Speaking on the latest action, Chief Executive of the UKGC, Andrew Rhodes, said:

“The circumstances of the last enforcement action may be different but both cases involve failing consumers – and this is something that is not acceptable.

“Today’s fine is one of our largest to date, and all should be clear that if there is a repeat of the failures at 888 then we have to seriously consider the suitability of the operator to uphold the licensing objectives and keep gambling safe and crime-free.

According to his words, Consumers in the UK deserve to know that when they place wagers, they are taking part in a leisure activity where brands have their role in keeping them secure and are conducting checks to ensure cash is crime-free.

When it comes to social responsibility failures, the company made the following:

• not detecting customers at risk of gambling harm as their policies arranged that financial checks have to be performed out after a total deposit of £40,000
• not conducting a customer interaction with a player who lost £37,000 in a six-week timeframe during the pandemic
• not considering the Commission’s guidance on player interaction
• granting a customer they knew was an NHS employee making £1400 a month a deposit cap of £1300 per month
• many interactions included an email only detailing the responsible gambling tools without the requirement for a customer response
• during a Commission evaluation, there was no proof of the brand proactively imposing restrictions on accounts with social responsibility concerns
• not ensuring that if a player holds multiple accounts those accounts are holistically controlled for interaction, with financial restrictions being applied across all accounts.

Furthermore, when it comes to money laundering failures, the operator implemented a policy where users were allowed to deposit £40,000 before SOF checks and did not determining what documents should be submitted within SOF checks.

Source: . European Gaming. March 2, 2022.