The United Kingdom Gambling Commission has imposed a fine worth £1 million on Greentube. Alderney Limited after an investigation revealed substantial failings in anti-money laundering (AML) and social responsibility measures. This marked the second penalty or regulatory action against the company which already paid £685,000 in 2021 for a similar breach.
The gambling authority has identified certain failures such as the inadequate implementation of mandatory policies on document verification and customer limits, insufficient scrutiny of client information, and delayed identification of vulnerable parameters. The commission also emphasized the fact that repeat offenders need to be faced with increasingly strict enforcement actions, especially when it comes to violating AML policies. In this article, we will talk about the details of social responsibility and AML failures of the Greentube Alderney Limited, trading as Admiral Casino.
Details of Social Responsibility Failures
The social responsibility failures that led to imposing fines on Greentube Alderney Limited included –
- Not implementing policies aimed at providing a safe casino environment where checks are made on customer income sustainability. It failed to ensure customer limits based on regular and sustainable income.
- There was a lack of adequate document verification processes to identify the authenticity of client submissions.
- There were no checks made whether the documents supplied by the customers were genuine.
- Moreover, there were many missed opportunities to identify customer vulnerability indicators. For incidence, a client who made frequent transactions to other online casinos in the UK and had a negative balance was still allowed to register on the platform.
- The same client deposited a total of £4000 within four months whose information was not escalated or reviewed before the deposit was made.
Overview of Anti-Money Laundering Failures
Greentube Alderney also faced penalties with its anti-money laundering measures. It did not scrutinize the available information on time which led to an avoidable delay in the client’s identification and escalation of terrorist financing and money laundering risk.
For instance, one client provided his bank statement with unusual and complex transactions, which included more than £100,000 being transferred and having a negative closing account balance. The operators took four months to scrutinize and escalate the statement.
Moreover, there was a neglect of risky occupations. In one such instance, risk was posed by a finance manager having access to misappropriated funds that were not built into the client’s risk profile. There were no steps taken by the operators to mitigate the risk.
Overall, there has been delayed action on such accounts which linked to known high-risk individuals. Another registered client had his account tied to an address that was linked to a previously blocked account with a criminal history (conviction for supplying class-A drugs).
