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The UK Gambling Commission has imposed a de facto fine of £375,000 plus costs on venerable British sports betting company Football Pools Limited over a string of “serious” anti-money laundering and social responsibility breaches.
Liverpool-based Football Pools Limited settled with the commission after an investigation into its online betting products, and will channel the £375,000 to approved “socially responsible causes” in lieu of a formal penalty, the commission said in a statement on Thursday (March 27).
The commission said Football Pools breached two parts of a licence condition relating to anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism financing (AML/CTF) controls and implementation, while breaching four remote customer interaction provisions.
“This case demonstrates that the licensee’s approach to anti-money laundering risk profiling and monitoring was insufficient, allowing high-risk customers to continue gambling before completing necessary enhanced due diligence checks,” enforcement director John Pierce said in a statement.
“In addition, the licensee was over-reliant on financial alerts that, whilst preventing significant losses, meant it failed to engage in a timely manner with some customers who were potentially experiencing other markers of gambling-related harm such as time spent gambling and high velocity spend.”
Pierce added that Football Pools has made “necessary improvements” since its compliance assessment, but he put the company on notice if it fails to maintain standards.
On the AML/CTF breaches, the commission found that Football Pools was “overly reliant on financial triggers” to identify greater customer risk, and lacked automatic “hard stops when AML thresholds were reached”, therefore relying on manual reviews of customers.
Those manual reviews, in turn, “did not always occur promptly” with an average delay of 25 days from the triggering of AML thresholds further undermining hard stop application.
On remote interaction breaches, the commission said Football Pools had “ineffective internal systems” for identifying problem customers, in part because certain thresholds were “set too high”.
“There was a large backlog of risk profiles still to be completed due to low staffing levels,” it said, leading to up to two months in delays in creating risk profiles for customers who had reached a financial trigger.
Overall, Football Pools’ monitoring system “was not sensitive enough to identify long periods of gambling as a potential marker of harm”, and the company did not always interact with clearly problematic customers, the commission said.
The statement added that the company’s failings were “serious” and occurred despite commission warnings on these matters after similar breaches by other companies.
However, Football Pools “swiftly” acted on its post-probe action plan and “fully co-operated” with the commission, it said.
Football Pools’ betting operations on British football date back to the 1920s. The operator of four gambling websites, including footballpools.com, is currently owned by London-based private equity firm OpCapita, which acquired the venture in 2017.
