UKGC Imposes £6.1M Fine on Online Operator In Touch Games

The UK Gambling Commission (UKGC) has imposed a fine of £6.1 million on In Touch Games (ITG) for social responsibility and anti-money laundering failures.

Social responsibility failures included:

• Not interacting with a customer until seven weeks after they had been flagged for interaction for erratic play patterns and extended periods of play.
• Accepting a customer’s word that they earned £6000 a month without verifying this information after the customer account was flagged due to customer spend and gambling during unsociable hours.

Anti-money laundering failures included:

• Not adequately taking account of the risk of a customer being a beneficiary of a life insurance policy; having links to high-risk jurisdictions; or being a politically exposed person (PEP), family member of a PEP or known close associates of a PEP, within its money laundering and terrorist financing risk assessment.
• Not having policies, procedures and controls in place to address the risk factors mentioned above.
• Not sufficiently considering the Commission’s money laundering and terrorist financing risk assessment or the Commission’s guidance.
• Not ensuring its policies, procedures and controls were implemented effectively, for example not following its own policy to request source of funds information from customers who had deposited and lost £10,000 in a 12-month period.

This is the third time ITG have faced regulatory action – in 2019 it paid a £2.2m settlement for regulatory failures and in 2021 it received a £3.4m fine and warning for further failures.

Kay Roberts, Executive Director of Operations at UKGC, 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.

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“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.”