One of Britain's biggest online gambling sites 888 has been fined a record £7.8m after the Gambling Commission ruled that the site allowed punters to gamble even though they had tried to block their own accounts in order to curb their betting habits.
888 has "significant flaws" in the way it protects problem customers, the regulator said. More than 7,000 vulnerable clients who had signed up to a scheme to block their access to 888 were still able to gamble through the firm's Bingo platform.
"One example given by the Gambling Commission was the company failing to challenge a customer who staked £1.3m over a 13-month period, with some of the money stolen from their employer," Sky News reports.
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While the gambling industry can't be expected to be a nursemaid to customers, the big firms accept they have a responsibility to ensure problem gamblers are protected from themselves. This represents a change in attitudes caused, in part, by how easy it is to gamble online.
According to the campaign group Justice for Punters, bookmakers have for too long held all the power. They are able to bankrupt some gamblers while refusing to take bets from others – the "tiny minority" who win – without giving a reason.
888's fine, the largest ever meted out to a bookmaker in the UK, includes repaying the £3.5m stakes deposited by those customers and compensating the employer of one site member who stole £62,000 to fund the addiction.
At £7.8m, the fine is 17 per cent of the pre-tax profits 888 made in the year it committed the infraction – a clear signal that the Gambling Commission's new boss, Sarah Harrison, is "far more willing to show her teeth than her predecessors were", The Guardian reported in July.
The fine is nearly 10 times as much as the second largest fine, an £880,000 penalty deducted from Gala Coral. The bookmaker took hundreds of thousands in stakes from one problem gambler who allegedly stole to fund his addiction.
