Regulatory action against Casumo, £6 million and extensive audit

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UKGC handed small reminder for Casumo again (not a first time):

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edit: accidentally posted bit too early.

There are some points which people could find interesting when wondering why something further than payslip or what ever document is required by casino operators, AML failures mentioned behind link, pasting here as well:

Anti-money laundering failings included:

  • Customers were allowed to deposit significant sums of money without sufficient AML checks being conducted.
  • Source of Funds (SOF) checks were insufficient. Payslips and invoices presented as evidence of SOF were not corroborated with bank statements (or other evidence).
  • Bank statements produced were not assessed appropriately. Examples include incomplete bank statements which only showed credits into the customer’s account. The balance figures on a customer’s bank statement had been redacted.
  • Inadequate checks of documentation for authenticity.
  • No assessment or limit of how much a customer should be allowed to spend based on known income, wealth or any other risk factors.
  • Winnings from other gambling operators were accepted as SOF, without further investigation.
  • Not ensuring that its policies, procedures and controls were implemented effectively, kept under review, revised appropriately to ensure that they remain effective and take into account any applicable learning or guidelines published by the Commission from time to time.

So it's not always just casinos joke or stalling or not willing to pay when they ask docs which feel really overwhelming and intrusive, UKGC gives operators quite strict guidelines in their AML, most of it and any detailed naturally not publically available to make them too easy to circumvent but in these ones you might see that some of these proofs from funds, information showing in bank statement etc... can be something what really is required by regulator.

Not to say that many times operators might ask nonsense things but like in these descriptions above, regulator was not really happy with minimal documentation without enough proof (often to proof transactions from two places, it's paid and received etc... therefore often only payslip or bank statement might not be sufficient).
 
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This type of thing shows what a joke the licensing has become. It's only 3 years ago since they were warned for the same thing, and given a similar penalty.
So what do they do this time? Suspend the license? No. Revoke the licence? No. Double/triple the penalty? No.
Give pretty much an identical sanction as last time. Yes.
What an absolute joke the UKGC are.
 
Now you know why they pissed about on my and everyone else's SoW - they were being investigated for the last 2 years.

Yup, these findings were not really fresh ones and now they have this pleasure:

As part of a new licence condition, Casumo must, at its own expense, instruct a firm of independent auditors to carry out an audit to examine transactions that have taken place post 1 July 2020 to ensure that it has effectively implemented its new policies, procedures and controls, and is compliant with the URL Not Found / Outdated.

Only this information would make me to stay away from Casumo, especially if from UK where they now need to make sure huge amount of accounts are handled correctly and they hold all required docs and information so few people might get requests even without very recent activity with them. Document requests are one of very few reasons casinos can contact even self-excluded players.
 
Problem with UKGC is that they only published the biggest customer they find failings on, which are obvious to most that those should have had proper checks. But they never publish in their statement what they tell operators about the smaller customers with medium and low risk profiles. So its gives a wrong picture for the public about the situation and why some customers gets intrusive checks when they aren't even medium risk profiles.
 
Problem with UKGC is that they only published the biggest customer they find failings on, which are obvious to most that those should have had proper checks. But they never publish in their statement what they tell operators about the smaller customers with medium and low risk profiles. So its gives a wrong picture for the public about the situation and why some customers gets intrusive checks when they aren't even medium risk profiles.

That's lovely part of this "highly efficient" AML monitoring, nobody can tell much details about the demanded level of verifications as that would make circumventing checks bit too easy.

There are very few SAR/STR which actually do get some real action after reported, also as we can see, mostly these big operator penalties are based to something else than traditional ML (Placement, Layering, Integration like all learn in school) but much more other criminal activities which often in these cases are RG related, people steal from work or make fraud to fund their gambling etc... To prevent these from happening in that scale that reach millions or hundreds or thousands, casinos are demanded to act much earlier which then cause loads of SOW/SOF verifications and due their nature, many average people struggle to comply with them or at least find them really unreasonable with so much sensitive information requested.

Hopefully within next few years somebody comes out with some great invention which could help AML monitoring in all industries who operate online (and offline but risk is categorized higher online where is no physical contact with customer as one extra layer of verification). Not only online casinos who face these challenges, of course nature of business make it higher risk as money is moving both ways, sometimes even to customer which is not case in online shopping etc..
 
According to that report, they let someone lose £1.1 million over 3 years.

That works out to £1000 a day for 3 years on average without a single check :eek2:.

Certainly a lack of responsibility in this case.
 
According to that report, they let someone lose £1.1 million over 3 years.

That works out to £1000 a day for 3 years on average without a single check :eek2:.

Certainly a lack of responsibility in this case.
Yeah. Let someone lose 1.1 million then wonder why they face more widespread scrutiny?

As I’ve said before, the cases that are highlighted by these reports are clear and obvious failings where 6 figure amounts are often involved. It looks essentially like the genuine low rollers are being hammered at certain places because the casino hasn’t wanted to piss off the high roller and thus got themselves placed under the microscope. A situation where they’ve essentially made a rod for their (and their customers’ backs).

Hence Davey’s post above.
 
So they let someone lose £1000 a day for 3 years but SOW me with ridiculous request for my small deposits that don’t add upto £100 a month?

These are quite old accounts and findings, they trying to improve for now i guess :) Of course in this kind of news is only given some worse failures by operator, there would be loads of smaller ones and to avoid these get big, you are told to start to check players much earlier stage, these public AML guidelines by UKGC linked here multiple times as well expect casinos complete verification with quite small total deposit thresholds which most people reach who just remain with casino bit longer.

Would assume Casumo haven't allow anyone to lose these amounts mentioned in this story in last years anymore like many have written to this forum as well, there is SOW for almost everyone (especially if you're from UK, UKGC love these more than other regulators).
 
Just shows how scummy Casumo have become.
Deposit £10 a week, get extremely long winded and intrusive SoW's that include holding withdrawals and asking for third party documentation (as seen on here multiple times).
Lose £1.1 MILLION and don't get asked for any SoW.
Lose £65000 in a month and don't get asked for any SoW.
Lose £76000 in 7 months (so £7500 a month on average) and don't get asked for any SoW.

Wonder what the difference is.......
 
Just shows how scummy Casumo have become.
Deposit £10 a week, get extremely long winded and intrusive SoW's that include holding withdrawals and asking for third party documentation (as seen on here multiple times).
Lose £1.1 MILLION and don't get asked for any SoW.
Lose £65000 in a month and don't get asked for any SoW.
Lose £76000 in 7 months (so £7500 a month on average) and don't get asked for any SoW.

Wonder what the difference is.......

Would honestly guess that biggest difference is that these incidents mentioned are not really lately happened but before they started their "SOW:s for all" approach which we saw here as well. Wouldn't assume anyone could get to those numbers these days with Casumo, something that was possible to happen some years ago might be not possible anymore.

These findings were surprisingly old, regulators usually don't look that far back, especially because Casumo been audited after these but naturally when there are something found, more will be searched. Best fun is that they have to complete audit process with their own expense and it need to be quite specific.
 
Just shows how scummy Casumo have become.
Deposit £10 a week, get extremely long winded and intrusive SoW's that include holding withdrawals and asking for third party documentation (as seen on here multiple times).
Lose £1.1 MILLION and don't get asked for any SoW.
Lose £65000 in a month and don't get asked for any SoW.
Lose £76000 in 7 months (so £7500 a month on average) and don't get asked for any SoW.

Wonder what the difference is.......
Exactly as I alluded to in my post above.

As far as I can see, the UKGC are only really intrusive into a business’s affairs where there have been examples of clear and obvious breaches. In this instance a 7 figure sum involved. All these instances do is draw attention to the business and makes them liable to enhanced scrutiny. Hence everyone then suffers.

It’s the same with any aspect of due diligence; take for example age restricted products in retail. If you fail a test purchase of an age restricted product, you then get punished and tested frequently thereafter until the regulating authority is satisfied the issues have been resolved. In this period where you are being scrutinised, you might ID everyone up to 40, going far beyond what is needed- and this is what is undoubtedly happening here.

The UKGC seem not so interested in small depositors- they’ve made that clear with the rumblings of a £400 a month deposit cut off before these checks are completed. That offers a pretty solid hint that having these intrusive checks at the £50 a week deposit threshold is well out of step and just not necessary to fulfil the regulatory obligations.
 
Would honestly guess that biggest difference is that these incidents mentioned are not really lately happened but before they started their "SOW:s for all" approach which we saw here as well. Wouldn't assume anyone could get to those numbers these days with Casumo, something that was possible to happen some years ago might be not possible anymore.

These findings were surprisingly old, regulators usually don't look that far back, especially because Casumo been audited after these but naturally when there are something found, more will be searched. Best fun is that they have to complete audit process with their own expense and it need to be quite specific.
How do you know they are historic failings though? Surely they are after 2018 when they last got a penalty for the same thing, or they would have been picked up then? If that is the case, the the £1.1 million case must have started in 2018 and ended 2020/2021. Thats not really old.

Fact is, they were given a penalty for failings almost identical to these more recent ones, and they clearly continued on doing the same thing.
 
How do you know they are historic failings though? Surely they are after 2018 when they last got a penalty for the same thing, or they would have been picked up then? If that is the case, the the £1.1 million case must have started in 2018 and ended 2020/2021. Thats not really old.

Fact is, they were given a penalty for failings almost identical to these more recent ones, and they clearly continued on doing the same thing.
Can't really write it word by word how i know and why but just happen to know, everyone can of course make their own opinions based on findings and available information. This is quite small island.

Wouldn't maybe keep that assumption as fact but more assumption/guess, don't know where can clearly see that they have continued doing same after they last time get penalized by UKGC, that might not be fact.
 
Can't really write it word by word how i know and why but just happen to know, everyone can of course make their own opinions based on findings and available information. This is quite small island.

Wouldn't maybe keep that assumption as fact but more assumption/guess, don't know where can clearly see that they have continued doing same after they last time get penalized by UKGC, that might not be fact.

Well that has made everything crystal clear.
 
Can't really write it word by word how i know and why but just happen to know, everyone can of course make their own opinions based on findings and available information. This is quite small island.

Wouldn't maybe keep that assumption as fact but more assumption/guess, don't know where can clearly see that they have continued doing same after they last time get penalized by UKGC, that might not be fact.
They got investigated, and found to be failing.
3 years later they have been the subject of another investigation, and found to be failing.

I fail to see how that doesn't show they continued to fail after the last time this happened. If they hadn't then surely there wouldn't have been a press release today.
 
yeah i used to play there,they asked for SOW/SOF 2 years ago so i sent it when they see transactions from other casinos they didnt like it and said i had a gambling problem(omg loads have a gambling problem,but i never skint myself)and that was is could not play anymore they had probably the best selection of slots and i had my biggest ever x win there,6000x on 300 shields 50p
 
yeah i used to play there,they asked for SOW/SOF 2 years ago so i sent it when they see transactions from other casinos they didnt like it and said i had a gambling problem(omg loads have a gambling problem,but i never skint myself)and that was is could not play anymore they had probably the best selection of slots and i had my biggest ever x win there,6000x on 300 shields 50p
This is the other thing. They’re either checking for AML or affordability, yet the two are being conflated. If they’re carrying out AML checks all they need to concern themselves over is whether the funds are legit.

This is what some on here have been saying, these AML checks are really just a proxy for analysing people’s financial status.
 

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