UK crackdown: Record £7.8m fine for 888 gambling site

Gambling Commission fines online firm for
failing to block more than 7,000 addicted customers

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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.

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.