Two online casinos will pay £1.3m between them after Gambling Commission investigations revealed that they were guilty of social responsibility failures. Rank Digital Gaming (Alderney) Limited must pay a £700,557 regulatory settlement for social responsibility failures, while Annexio (Jersey) Limited must pay a £612,000 regulatory settlement for social responsibility and money laundering failures.

Licensed gambling operators have a legal duty to ensure their gambling facilities are provided in compliance with the Gambling Act 2005, the conditions of their licence and in accordance with the licensing objectives

Annexio failed to comply with licence and code conditions regarding prevention of money laundering and terrorist financing, rules about customer interaction and reporting key events and other reportable events.

Rank also failed to comply with requirements regarding customer interaction, identification of individual customers and the rules around self-exclusion.

The Gambling Commission highlights that gambling operators should take account of the failings identified in the investigations to ensure industry learning and so should consider the following issues:

  • do you have formal processes to measure the effectiveness of your anti-money laundering and safer gambling policies and are findings adequately recorded?
  • do you efficiently record all compliance-related decisions and are you able to demonstrate to the Commission, on request, evidence of ongoing assessment, evaluation and improvement?
  • do you incorporate lessons learned from public statements into your policy and processes?
  • are your customer risk profiles formed by, or linked to, your money laundering and terrorist financing risk assessment?
  • do you have a formalised process for analysing the effectiveness of customer interactions to ensure that reviews are adequately documented and consistent in their approach?
  • do you log the types of behaviour which have triggered a customer interaction and keep sufficiently detailed records of interactions, along with decisions not to interact?
  • have your staff received sufficient training about money laundering and social responsibility?