Gambling firm In Touch fined over £6m for failing to protect vulnerable customers and money laundering breaches
In Touch Games has been fined £6.1m for social responsibility and money laundering failings by the Gambling Commission.
The gambling firm, which operates 11 websites including bonusboss.co.uk, cashmo.co.uk, drslot.co.uk, jammymonkey.com and slotfactory.com, was charged over not having appropriate policies, procedures and controls in place and not sufficiently considering or implementing the regulator’s money laundering and terrorist financing risk assessment or guidance.
In Touch also breached social responsibility requirements, in one example not interacting with a customer until seven weeks after they had been flagged for erratic and extended play and accepting a customer’s word that they earned £6,000 a month without verifying this until they were flagged for gambling during unsociable hours.
This is not the first time In Touch games has been fined. In 2019 it paid a £2.2 m settlement for failures and in 2021 it received a £3.4m fine and warning for further failures.
Kay Roberts, executive director of operations at the Gambling Commission, said: “Considering this operator’s history of failings we expected to see significant improvement when we carried out our planned compliance assessment. Disappointingly, although many improvements had been made, there was still more to do. This £6.1m fine shows that we will take escalating enforcement action where failures are repeated and all licensees should be acutely aware of this.”
Fergal Parkinson, co-founder and director of TMT Analysis, told Morning Wire that an appropriately worded Online Safety Bill in the UK could help companies like In Touch games avoid such major fines.
He said that having more stringent legislation could “protect companies against reputational risk from failing to prevent underage users from viewing explicit or unsuitable content. In extreme cases, improved security can also ensure that companies avoid fines for poor practice.”
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