Football Pools has become the latest gambling operator to be hit with a six-figure penalty by Britain’s Gambling Commission.
The company, which operates four licensed websites in Great Britain, including footballpools.com, will pay £375,000 to socially responsible causes as part of a settlement with the Commission.
The penalty relates to failures in the company’s social responsibility and anti-money laundering policies and procedures between September 2022 and August 2023.
During that time, Football Pools failed to comply with licensing requirements to prevent money laundering, which the Gambling Commission attributed to an over-reliance on financial triggers to identify high risk customers.
The operator was also found to have allowed high risk players to continue to gamble after triggers were hit, only stopping the activity when manual reviews took place, with the regulator noting that these manual reviews did not always occur promptly.
The Commission also found incidents of delays in the creation of customer risk profiles, incidents where risk profiles had not been created, and incidents where risk profiles were not completed for a significant period – on average 25 days after the financial trigger was hit.
The operator’s social responsibility failings included ineffective internal systems for identifying at risk gamblers, as well as insufficient evaluation of individual customer interactions. The company’s safer gambling messaging was also found to be lacking in relation to customers who had opted out of receiving marketing communications.
John Pierce, Commission Director of Enforcement, said: “This case demonstrates that the Licensee’s approach to anti-money laundering risk profiling and monitoring was insufficient, allowing high-risk customers to continue gambling before completing necessary enhanced due diligence checks.
“In addition, the Licensee was over-reliant on financial alerts that whilst preventing significant losses meant it failed to engage in a timely manner with some customers who were potentially experiencing other markers of gambling-related harm such as time spent gambling and high velocity spend.
“While it is recognised that necessary improvements have been made by the Licensee following the completion of the compliance assessment, the Commission will take further action if these standards are not maintained.”