In the United Kingdom and iGaming operator Platinum Gaming Limited has been ordered to pay a fine approaching £1.62 million ($2.04 million) after it was found to have breached the Gambling Commission’s rules on money laundering and social responsibility.

Unibet.co.uk involved:

The regulator used an official Thursday press release to declare that it had launched an investigation into the London-headquartered firm following reports that ‘a convicted fraudster’ had been gambling stolen money on the Unibet.co.uk domain the operator runs on behalf of Kindred Group. It moreover stated that this unnamed individual ‘had been convicted of a £2 million fraud’ and had subsequently gone on to lose £629,420 ($794,894) of this cash with Platinum Gaming.

Player protection:

The Gambling Commission announced that such circumstances had represented a breach of its anti-money laundering regulations because the operator had failed ‘to make adequate enquiries about the source of the funds the customer used to gamble.’ It additionally explained that Platinum should have ‘considered refusing or barring service to the customer’ after they had racked up such high losses but instead had ‘continued to allow the customer to gamble.’

Sentence specifics:

As part of the settlement, the UK regulator used the press release to detail that Platinum has been ordered to return the stolen cash to its rightful owners and voluntarily hand over some £990,200 ($1.24 million) in lieu a being hit with an even steeper financial penalty. Richard Watson, Executive Director for the Commission, used the press release to proclaim that his group subsequently intends to use this latter amount to accelerate the delivery of its National Strategy to Reduce Gambling Harms, which is a three-year coordinated endeavor that has been designed to diminish industry-wide gambling harms.

Continued vigilance:

Watson also described this case as ‘yet another example’ of the Gambling Commission ‘taking firm action’ in regards to those ‘who fail to protect consumers or implement effective safeguards against money laundering.’ He furthermore asserted that the UK’s iGaming sector must intensify its efforts at ‘providing consumers in Great Britain with the safest and fairest gambling market in the world’ and that the regulator would ‘continue to take action’ where it sees failings.

Watson’s statement read…

“There were weaknesses in Platinum Gaming Limited’s systems and as a consequence more than half a million pounds of stolen money flowed through the business. This is not acceptable and I would urge all operators to carefully read this case and learn lessons so they don’t make the same mistakes.”