In Touch Games fined £6.1m for anti-money laundering failings

The UK Gambling Commission has fined In Touch Games £6.1 million for failings relating to social responsibility and anti-money laundering. The operator behind gambling sites including bonusboss.co.uk, cashmo.co.uk, drslot.co.uk, is being fined for the third time after it failed a gambling compliance assessment.

After a thorough Investigation into the operator, the UKGC found it failed on several oversight issues such as having appropriate procedures and policies in place to prevent gambling harm, money laundering and inadvertently financing terrorism. The company was found not to have acted in the best interest of its patrons.

In one instance, the watchdog found out In Touch took the word of a gambler who said they earn £6,000 a month without verifying the information until they saw said gambler playing at odd hours. On another occasion, the company failed to interact with a customer until seven weeks after they had been flagged for “erratic play patterns and extended periods of play”.

Furthermore, In Touch was found guilty of “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,” according to a statement from the commission.

Kay Roberts, Executive Director of Operations, 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.

“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.”

In 2019, In Touch paid £2.2m and £3.4m in 2021 for failures of the same nature. The company is yet to comment on the new penalty.

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