UKGC Fine Leo-Vegas £1.32 million!

[Garf79]

A splash in the ocean really but Leo-Vegas have been fined a pretty big chunk of change by the UKGC for several reasons. The first reason was the social responsability failure of the Gambling Act:

• setting spend triggers for Safer Gambling Team customer review significantly higher than the average customer’s spend without any explanation as to how this was appropriate
• 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
• not acting on their own policy of interacting with customers exhibiting indicators of harm including denied deposits, cancelled withdrawals, long game play sessions, gambling sessions occurring late at night or early in the morning
• not sufficiently taking into account the Commission’s 2019 guidance on customer interaction.

Leo-Vegas made several big mistakes on some smaller UK based casinos and they have paid the price, the casinos in question were slotboss.co.uk, pinkcasino.co.uk, betuk.com and 21.co.uk. The second breach of UKGC guidelines came from the money laundering aspect of running an online casino business and of course not a lot of info is given on this as they do not want to highlight how people can launder money online but it involves sports betting mostly and people betting on events with only 2 outcomes. You can read the full report below and this one is actually interesting reading, there are a few good points in there and this is clear evidence that gambling regulators are getting very serious with operators. The coming months/years are going to be very interesting in terms of regulations and in terms of our own freedom to do what we want with our money, it is starting to feel very "Big Brother" to me and I don't like it!

 

Quote

 

Gambling operator LeoVegas will pay a £1.32 million penalty for social responsibility and anti-money laundering failures.

The operator – which runs leovegas.com, slotboss.co.uk, pinkcasino.co.uk, betuk.com and 21.co.uk – will also receive an official warning and undergo an audit to ensure it is effectively implementing its anti-money laundering and social responsibility policies, procedures and controls.

Leanne Oxley, Gambling Commission Director of Enforcement and Intelligence, said: “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.”

Social responsibility failures included:

• setting spend triggers for Safer Gambling Team customer review significantly higher than the average customer’s spend without any explanation as to how this was appropriate
• 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
• not acting on their own policy of interacting with customers exhibiting indicators of harm including denied deposits, cancelled withdrawals, long gameplay sessions, gambling sessions occurring late at night or early in the morning
• not sufficiently taking into account the Commission’s 2019 guidance on customer interaction.

Anti-money laundering failures 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
• inappropriate controls allowing significant levels of gambling spend to take place within a short space of time without knowing anything about customers’ financial situations.

Read LeoVegas Gaming PLC full penalty.                                                        (SOURCE)