Gambling with Lives calls for GC to revoke operators’ licences for repeated failings
Charity reaches out to industry stakeholders to put pressure on the regulator to revoke operating licences for firms with repeated failures following £6m fine handed to Gamesys
The post Gambling with Lives calls for GC to revoke operators’ licences for repeated failings first appeared on EGR Intel.
Gambling with Lives has launched a petition that calls on the Gambling Commission (GC) to revoke the licences of operators that repeatedly breach licensing conditions.
The charity said the regulator had elected to dish out “toothless, easily payable fines” instead of revoking licences for UK-licensed firms and has launched the petition as a result.
The petition, which is live on 38degrees and addressed to the GC, takes serious umbrage with the perceived failing of the regulator to clamp down on operator failings.
In a statement attached to the petition, Gambling with Lives said: “Multi-billion-pound gambling operators see fines as a cost of business and can carry on without the need to change.
“The big gambling firms will never change their ways unless forced to. The threat of no longer operating would be a real deterrent.
“It’s time to let the Gambling Commission know that they must revoke licences for serious failures to help stop the deaths.”
At the time of writing, the petition has broken the 1,000-signature threshold, more than 50% of its 2,000 signature target.
The launch of the petition comes after the GC issued a £6m fine to Gamesys for historical social responsibility and anti-money laundering (AML) failings.
These failings, which occurred between November 2021 and July 2022, were discovered by the regulator during a compliance assessment of the online casino and bingo operator in May 2022.
The GC found the operator had failed to adhere to three AML requirements and one social responsibility code breach.
AML failings during the aforementioned period included allowing a number of customers to avoid AML threshold checks and continue to spend “significant sums”.
One customer deposited more than £14,000 in a 28-week period, while another was able to deposit £24,280 in under six weeks.
The GC also ruled the Jackpotjoy parent company was “conducting inadequate customer due diligence and being over-reliant on third-party information”.
It was also found that the operator’s deposit limit system didn’t flag risks of harm quickly enough.
That system allowed one customer to deposit £8,255 within three days of opening an account, with no risks identified. Another customer lost £17,842 within 34 days of opening their account, again with no alerts to risk.
The charity was founded in 2018 and has become a major lobbying force in the gambling sector while advocating for stronger restrictions on the sector and the removal of gambling-related advertising.
Gambling with Lives is also using this petition launch to encourage stakeholders to engage with the GC’s white paper consultation on bonuses and incentives, which closes on 21 February.
The post Gambling with Lives calls for GC to revoke operators’ licences for repeated failings first appeared on EGR Intel.
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