Star Sports fined £594,000 for AML and social responsibility failings
The Gambling Commission (GC) has hit Star Sports with a £594,000 penalty for social responsibility and anti-money laundering (AML) shortcomings.
The Hove-headquartered on-course, retail and online company was also given an official warning and will have special conditions applied to its licence.
In its ruling, the GC said that Star Sports’ parent company, Star Racing Limited, allowed customers to deposit large sums of money before obtaining source of funds information and failed to analyse the source of funds information when it was received.
The GC noted these shortcomings were due to the fact that the firm had ineffective policies, procedures and controls in place at the time the investigation was carried out.
Regarding social responsibility, Star Sports failed to demonstrate an understanding of the impact and effectiveness of customer interactions in terms of minimising customer risk.
The regulator said these failings occurred between March 2020 and May 2021, a period when the UK was entering and exiting lockdown restrictions due to Covid-19.
The penalty comes following reports in March that Star Sports had ignored its social responsibility requirements.
As detailed by the Racing Post, punter Sean O’Brien claimed that between 14 September 2018 and 30 March 2019, he was able to stake £419,252 despite making Star Sports aware of his gambling problem.
O’Brien maintained he had spoken to a cashier at Star Sports about his issue, but the defence counter-argued that he had never specifically mentioned his gambling problem and that his claims were “all nonsense”.
Star Sports’ penalty is the latest in a series of punishments issued by the regulator this year. This included a record £19.2m settlement with William Hill, a £7.1m fine for Kindred for similar failings as Star Sports and cracking down on Paddy Power for historical marketing failures.
Earlier this year, GC executive director Tim Miller said the regulator could not rely solely on dishing out these penalties to improve compliance among operators.
He said that fines and regulatory settlements played an important role in the regulator’s arsenal but they couldn’t be relied upon as a silver bullet. Miller went on to say that the growing number of regulatory cases and the wider coverage of the regulator’s approach had helped stymie operator compliance breaches