QuinnBet Fined £600,000 as the UKGC Uncovers Serious Compliance Failures

The Irish casino-sportsbook QuinnBet has been fined £600,000 after the Gambling Commission uncovered a trail of licence breaches and regulatory failings.

From customers staking more than £200,000 in a single day to one player that placed more than 11,000 bets in 48 hours, the UKGC’s investigation revealed a catalogue of issues that left them with no choice but to demand a huge six-figure fine.

It continues a summer of crackdown on the part of the regulator, who collected the best part of £10 million in sanctions from the Rank Group and Evolution last month.

Serious Issues

The level of the social responsibility failures and anti-money laundering (AML) failings from QuinnBet was astounding.

As well as those episodes detailed in the introduction, the firm also allowed another customer to deposit £9,000 into their account inside four days – despite financial checks revealing that the individual earned £2,000 a month.

QuinnBet were also held to have not done enough to tackle the threat of money laundering; in one case, a customer was able to deposit £120,000 before withdrawing £111,000 – without adequate checks to determine where those funds came from.

All told, a whopping 194 QuinnBet customers were able to deposit amounts far greater than their set deposit limit due to errors in the firm’s automated and manual checking processes.

Ineffective Processes

The UKGC found an absence of ‘effective processes’ for evaluating customer behaviour; including one in-house tool that reported back on player activity with a day’s delay.

That meant that a player exhibiting problem gambling signs wouldn’t automatically be identified until the following day – including the individual that wagered £215,000 in a single day without any intervention on the part of QuinnBet.

As if all of that wasn’t enough, QuinnBet used a manual checking system to monitor the deposit limits set by 18-24-year-olds; a group said to be most at risk of gambling harm.

However, there would often be delays in checking the limit changes imposed by players, meaning that those most at risk were able to continue depositing funds at their previous (usually higher) levels.

One example provided by the UKGC included a player, described as a ‘young adult’, who was able to deposit an amount eight times higher than their limit because QuinnBet hadn’t actioned the change quickly enough.

Errors in the company’s reporting software also allowed some customers to deposit as much as six times more than their set limit, with an alarm only triggered when they had lost double their loss limit.

Mitigating Circumstances

The Gambling Commission did recognise some mitigating circumstances, including QuinnBet’s migration to a new software platform, which had not gone according to plan.

The Irish firm hadn’t been fined or suffered any regulatory penalties prior to this sanction, dating back to when they were first handed their UK licence in 2022, and implemented an action plan to improve once the regulator revealed their findings.

As such, the £609,104 fine was perhaps a lot lower than it might otherwise have been. The director of enforcement at the UKGC, John Pierce, said:

A Fine Summer

It takes the amount raised by regulatory sanctions this summer to nearly £11 million, with a huge chunk of that paid by the Rank Group and Evolution, respectively.

The former was responsible for a raft of licence breaches and offered to pay £5 million as a settlement, while the latter was fined £4.75 million after a number of their games were discovered at unlicensed and illegal casinos.

Earlier this week, UK Adult Gaming Centre operator Holland Park Leisure was fined £150,000 for failing to join a recognised self-exclusion programme.