One customer was allowed to spend £65,835 in just five months without SOF checks being carried out.Self-exclusion is meant to operate as a fail-safe to prevent anyone who has chosen to bar themselves from gambling, such as people trying to quit, from succumbing to temptation.

This included accepting verbal assurances from customers on their employment income, not setting out which documents should be requested as part of SOF checks. The online casino company, which is in the process of buying William Hill’s UK assets, also failed to carry out proper “source of funds” (SOF) checks to prevent money laundering. “Consumers in Britain deserve to know that when they gamble, they are participating in a leisure activity where operators play their part in keeping them safe and are carrying out checks to ensure money is crime-free.” “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. “The circumstances of the last enforcement action may be different but both cases involve failing consumers – and this is something that is not acceptable,” said Rhodes. In another case, 888 placed a deposit cap of £1,300 a month on the account of an NHS worker whom it knew earned £1,400 a month.Īn audit carried out in October 2020 found that most of the company’s social responsibility interactions with customers consisted of a single email describing the available responsible gambling tools and did not involve customer interaction.Īndrew Rhodes, the chief executive of the Gambling Commission, pointed out that this was 888’s second big fine, after it was hit with a £7.8m penalty in 2017, a record at the time.

In one case, the company did no checks on a customer until they had lost £37,000 in just six weeks during 2020, a time when the commission had asked companies to be cautious about luring in people who might be more vulnerable due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The regulator said 888 was not properly identifying customers who were at risk of harm because it did not carry out financial checks until they had deposited £40,000. The fine comes just weeks before the government is due to publish proposals to reform gambling regulation, potentially including affordability checks to make sure people can afford the amounts they are betting.

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