The United Kingdom Gambling Commission (UKGC) has announced it has levied a fine of £19.2 million against William Hill Group for what it described as "social responsibility and anti-money laundering failures." The fine is the largest ever issued by the UKGC and William Hill Group has agreed to pay the fine in settlement of a long list of problems that led the UKGC to give "serious consideration" to suspending William Hill's operator's license.
The £19.2M fine (about USD $23.6M) covers behaviors found to be in violation at three WHG entities. WHG (International) Limited, the parent of williamhill.com, will pay £12.5 million. Mr Green Limited, which runs mrgreen.com, will pay £3.7 million. William Hill Organization Limited, which operates 1,344 gambling shops and kiosks across Britain, will pay £3 million.
"When we launched this investigation the failings we uncovered were so widespread and alarming serious consideration was given to licence suspension," said Andrew Rhodes, Gambling Commission chief executive. "However, because the operator immediately recognised their failings and worked with us to swiftly implement improvements, we instead opted for the largest enforcement payment in our history."
The UKGC summary listed numerous described failures in both the social-responsibility and anti-money-laundering categories, with some crossover. Most of the social-responsibility issues occurred with newly established accounts, on a few occasions allowing new customers to wager tens of thousands of pounds almost immediately without performing checks.
The anti-money laundering issues also typical involved high-dollar wagering transactions and generally amounted to a failure to check for the source of a gambler's funds. For instance, in examples that occurred at William Hill's retail outlets, the operator "failed to request Source of Funds (SoF) evidence when one customer staked £19,000 in a single bet, did not obtain documentation from a customer who staked £39,324 and lost £20,360 in 12 days, and did not obtain SoF evidence from a customer who staked £276,942 and lost £24,395 over two months."
The UKGC is perhaps the world's most aggressive regulator when it comes to enforcing and penalizing a wide variety of behavior deemed predatory or negligent toward casinos. The Gambling Commission installed enhanced consumer-protection codes in the wake of several high-profile gambling-addiction cases last decade, some of which included problem gamblers embezzling funds from employers or other sources and losing the money on UK-licensed sites. In 2020, the United Kingdom also barred the use of credit cards as a means of funding gambling accounts.
