Rank Group hit with £700,000 Gambling Commission fine over social responsibility failings

The UK Gambling Commission (UKGC) has slapped Rank Group’s online business with a £700,557 fine over failings in its social responsibility and customer interaction processes. Rank Digital Gaming, trading as bellacasino.com, grosvenorcasino.com, meccabingo.com and meccagames.com, was found guilty of breaking social responsibility regulation on three front following an investigation by the UK regulator. In the first of these identified failings , the group failed to adequately interact with customers to prevent gambling-related harm between October 2019 and February 2021. Investigators have suggested Rank was “overly reliant” on setting proactive deposit limits rather than carrying out individual assessments of players, and its processes for identifying other markers of potential harm were “largely reactive” rather than proactive in nature. This overreliance, the UKGC has said centred on the usage of its internal £1,000 30-day net loss threshold to identify potential signs of problematic gambling. “It [Rank Group]  used average income data to set deposit limits which were, on occasion, set too high, and which made assumptions based on other open-source information which should have been corroborated against other independent sources of information,” the UKGC said. In respect of social responsibility, Rank was found to have not monitored customer activity to ensure that multiple accounts were not set up by individuals seeking to circumnavigate Rank’s internal loss limits. When confronted by the UKGC regarding the failings, Rank accepted that a small percentage of customers held more than one account and that some had circumvented the controls. “Despite the relatively low numbers, it needed to protect customers who were limited by them or displayed at risk behaviours, from creating new accounts unchecked,” the regulator said. “The Licensee [Rank] has implemented enhanced controls for identifying duplicate accounts, particularly for restricted customers,” it added. Rank was also found to have allowed 1,416 customer accounts to be created on its Bella Casino and Mecca Games website that were a match to individuals who appeared on Rank’s self-exclusion register. Rank blamed the account issues on the migration of the Bella Casino brand migration to the Stride platform in November 2020, with the UKGC deeming the firm’s manual processes “insufficient” to mitigate the risks of self-exclude customers opening new accounts. The UKGC has revealed that Rank cooperated with investigators at all stages of the investigation, reporting all failings early taking steps to remedy these failings and offering to make a financial settlement to the regulator for the breaches. Elsewhere, the UKGC has also issued Jersey-based gambling firm Annexio with a £612,000 fine over social responsibility and money laundering failures. Trading as lottogo.com, Annexio was found guilty of failing to address certain risks highlighted by its money laundering risk assessment processes, including the use of numerous low-level transactions to avoid detection and risk associated with crypto asset transactions. The UKGC also found there were unjustified delays in completing enhanced due diligence (EDD) checks which resulted in customers being able to gamble vast sums before a limit was placed on their account. On the social responsibility front, the firm was found to have failed to subsequently triggered enquiries into customers after EDD checks were mandated, as well as failing to assess bank statements. The firm also refused a customer’s request for a limit on their account to be reduced, therefore allowing them to continue gambling when they may have been financially unstable. In the case of both fines, the settlements will be contributed towards the National Strategy to Reduce Gambling Harms. Delivering her assessment of the failings, UKGC executive director Helen Venn said: “We expect high standards from operators to ensure gambling in Britain is safe and crime free. “Those businesses that fail to meet these standards will find themselves facing costly regulatory action,” she added.