Camelot slapped with £3.15m UKGC fine over National Lottery app failings

Camelot has been fined £3.15m by the UK Gambling Commission (UKGC) over three key historic failings relating to the National Lottery app.

Camelot, which recently lost the bid for the fourth National Lottery licence to Allwyn UK, has been sanctioned over failings between November 2016 and January 2021.

The most damning breach saw the operator send marketing materials to 65,400 players who had either been flagged as showing signs of gambling-related issues or had self-excluded via GAMSTOP between February 2018 and January 2021.

Camelot said that when downloading the app, users were prompted to either opt-in or opt-out of receiving marketing materials, and that the firm had the ability to add “suppression flags” to player accounts who were at risk.

However, a technical failing within the app led to these players receiving materials.

Camelot said a trigger event would occur if players moved between multiple apps while the National Lottery app remained open.

This delay could result in a player’s ID being “anonymous due to the app not automatically identifying the player during its initial session”. This led to push notifications being sent to players.

Camelot said that if a player re-launched the app, it would reset the player’s status and their ID would be re-aligned to the suppression list.

Secondly, between November 2016 and September 2020, Camelot said a potential 20,000 customers had been impacted by its malfunctioning QR scanner within the app.

The QR scanner function, on iOS only, was wrongly informing players their tickets were non-winning.

Camelot said players missed out on between £48,000 and £68,000, however, it was unable to ratify this figure.

Camelot explained it was unable to identify how many customers were impacted by this issue due to the fact the retail players were not required to log into the app.

Finally, in October 2020, 22,210 players were affected by two separate incidents of duplicate wagers within the National Lottery app.

In the scenario, players had purchased a draw-based game but instead of seeing the ticket confirmation page, they were logged out of the app.

Upon logging back in, players were met with the same option to buy the ticket, which led some players to believe the purchase had not completed and therefore bought the ticket again.

Camelot said all those players impacted had either been refunded for the duplicate wager, or where the duplicate was a winner, this was also honoured.

In its findings, the UKGC said that the breach had “placed the statutory objectives at risk” and considered that the potential impact on the reputation of the National Lottery could be “significant”.

Andrew Rhodes, UKGC chair, said: “We are reassured that Camelot has taken steps to make sure that their National Lottery app is fit for purpose.

“However, we must caution Camelot that any failings on their duties will be met with consequences. Today’s announcement reinforces that any operator failing to comply with their licence requirements will be investigated by the Commission and we will not hesitate to issue fines if requirements are breached,” he added.