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The UK Gambling Commission has issued a penalty of £685,000 (€804,000) to Greentube Alderney, part of Novomatic, for failings in anti-money laundering and social responsibility policies.
The UK-focused unit of the Austrian gambling giant will pay the sum in lieu of a fine and will undergo "extensive independent auditing" for failures in player interaction policies between September 2019 and November 2020, the Gambling Commission said today (December 2).
The Greentube unit is based in Guernsey in the Channel Islands and operates admiralcasino.co.uk and bellfruitcasino.com.
Greentube failed to adequately monitor money laundering risks during off-hours, and its policies allowed some players to deposit and lose significant sums of money before the source of funds was requested, the Gambling Commission said.
It also had inadequate recordkeeping processes, which included a lack of clear evidence of an audit trail in some cases, the regulator said.
The company accepted that some employees conducted inadequate source of funds and source of wealth checks and that there were "unacceptable delays" in confirming ownership of payment methods used by some players, the commission said.
Greentube relied too heavily on threshold triggers and lacked information on how much players should be allowed to spend based on income, the Gambling Commission said.
The commission said that the penalty was aggravated by the "serious nature of the breaches identified" but mitigated by the company's "early recognition of failings" and the extent of steps taken in remediation of problems.
