The UK Gambling Commission (UKGC) may have their own problems, but they continue to regulate the gambling industry. This week has seen them give EU Lotto a £760,000 fine for breaches of anti-money laundering rules and social responsibility.
EU Lotto are known in the UK as the operators of the Lottoland site. The UKGC fined them over incidents that took place between October 2019 and November of last year. That’s not all though as a formal warning has also been issued to EU Lotto and extensive independent auditing is going to be carried out.
It’s a serious problem but the UKGC will be keen to show that they continue to take strong action against those breaking rules. The executive director of the UKGC is Helen Venn. She explained that there had been “planned compliance activity” of EU Lotto. The executive director added that the action taken illustrates that they will not hesitate to act against those who “fail to meet the high standards we expect for consumers in Britain.”
This week has seen criticism of the UKGC for the way they handled the Football Index collapse. The Parliamentary All-Party Betting and Gaming Group is also reviewing them, so an interesting few months lies ahead.
There had been several examples of EU Lotto failing when it came to anti-money laundering rules that are in place. The UKGC say that there was a failure to analyse or effectively review their clients bank statements. This meant that they were not finding proof of their addresses.
Another problem was that EU Lotto failed to restrict the accounts of customers once there had been submission of source of funds requests. There were also concerns over the use of debit cards as a payment method. This saw them allowing the use of third-party debit cards.
Regarding the issue of social responsibility requirement failures. The UKGC discovered that EU Lotto didn’t take any action when customers kept changing their deposit limits. Also, there were not suitable assessments made of customers who may have been in danger of being harmed or were already in that state.
It found that the operator did not consider markers of harm for customers who have been changing their deposit limits frequently. Additionally, the UKGC pointed out that the operator failed to conduct suitable financial and affordability assessments to identify if a customer is being at risk of harm or already being harmed.
The complaints list continued to grow when looking at how EU Lotto dealt with their customers. While they did send out emails giving details of tools that can help with responsible gambling, they didn’t ask for a response.
Nigel Birrell, who is the CEO of Lottoland said that the fine concerned “legacy issues”. The problems that have been mentioned have now been dealt with. He added that they now have in-depth compliance measures that fit in with the standards that the UKGC wish to see followed.
The CEO said that Lottoland are now “fully committed to ensuring the highest standards of compliance.” To ensure this is the case, the number of staff dealing with this has been doubled and third-party support added.
