William Hill targeted by Swedish regulator over historic verification concerns

William Hill International has been issued with a Swedish injunction over the use of manual know your customer (KYC) checking of Swedish players over a six-month period.

The imposition of the injunction follows a high-level review of customer accounts belonging to Evoke Gaming Limited, William Hill’s Swedish operational entity by the Swedish Gambling Authority (SGA).

Under the Swedish Gaming Act, only persons who are resident or permanently resident in Sweden may be registered for online gaming.

This includes being resident in Sweden for six months or more and is often verified externally by review of Swedish Tax Agency records and the usage of the Swedish BankID system.

Scrutiny centres around the verification of customer residency for a six-month period from January 2019 to July 2019, a period during which the SGA investigation has found the firm conducted manual verification of players.

In the period prior to regulation, existing Swedish customer residency was ascertained by the use of a Swedish IP address by that player.

With the introduction of the Swedish licensing system in January 2019, existing Swedish account holders were migrated customers to a separate back-office system adapted to Swedish law.

Existing customers were forced to accept new terms and conditions, providing national ID numbers, at which point records were checked against the Spelpaus self-exclusion database.

Those customers were then given the status of “temporary gaming account”, a designation under which 1,837 accounts were created.

Temporary accounts were not converted to permanent accounts without validating their BankID via the Trustly Pay N Play depositing system. Once matched the account would be switched to a permanent status.

As an alternative option available to players between January and July 2019, a manual verification process was offered by Evoke Gaming under which players could provide ID and address verification.

In addition, if a high level of customer risk was established, the firm used increase verification obtained through so-called open sources.

“Evoke Gaming Ltd has also been able to do manual checks against Bisnode to confirm the information provided by the customer into the company,” Evoke Gaming wrote in its response to the SGA inquiry

“In certain situations, Evoke Gaming Ltd has also used telephone verification to ensure that the person who registered the account is also the one person using the account.

“Telephone verification is done so that Evoke Gaming Ltd calls the customer on the telephone number he has entered and sets a number of control questions about the activity on the account and orally verify the information the customer has provided,” Evoke Gaming added.

Under this rationale temporary accounts which were not validated within 30 days were closed. EGR has learned that only a handful of accounts were reviewed by the SGA as part of this process.

In August 2019, Evoke switched off the manual verification process, ceasing to offer temporary accounts and only offering verification through the Trustly system.

The Trustly process used by Evoke has been signed off by the SGA as fully compliant with Swedish law.

In delivering its assessment of the manual process used in the prior period the SGA suggested procedures used by Evoke Gaming during the period were “not sufficient” to ensure effective verification of Swedish customer residency as provided for under the Swedish Gambling Act.

“The Swedish Gaming Inspectorate thus assesses that Evoke Gaming Ltd’s previous routines for the manual KYC control has entailed a risk that Evoke Gaming Ltd will not has met the requirements in ch. Section 1 of the Gaming Act regarding registration of customers on the grounds that the customers are resident or permanently residing in Sweden,” the SGA added.

Evoke Gaming limited has been tasked by the Swedish Gambling Authority to produce a full report on the verification measures taken to re-verify the manually registered players during the period from January 2019 to July 2019, submitting that report no later than 9 November.

However, it is understood that the SGA conducted a full audit of Evoke’s verification procedures during 2020, finding no breaches of Swedish law and that the request for a report on prior measures is effectively a doublechecking of the verification carried out.

William Hill did not comment further on the report request after being approached by EGR.