In Touch Games fined by the Gambling Commission

By Dave Sawyer, Last updated Apr 17, 2023

The UK Gambling Commission have this morning announced that they have fined Birmingham based In Touch Games £6.1m after an investigation revealed social responsibility and money laundering failings, in news that has made the main stream media outlets.

In Touch Games that own and operate a number of online casino brands according to the UKGC failed a compliance assessment that took place during March of last year.

On the publication on their website announcing the fine meted out to In Touch Games which can be read in full here, the Gambling Commission state:

“Social responsibility failures included:

• Not interacting with a customer until seven weeks after they had been flagged for interaction for erratic play patterns and extended periods of play.
• Accepting a customer’s word that they earned £6,000 a month without verifying this information after the customer account was flagged due to customer spend and gambling during unsociable hours.

Anti-money laundering failures included:

• Not adequately taking account of the risk of a customer being a beneficiary of a life insurance policy ; having links to high-risk jurisdictions; or being a politically exposed person (“PEP”), family member of a PEP or known close associates of a PEP, within its money laundering and terrorist financing risk assessment.
• Not having policies, procedures and controls in place to address the risk factors mentioned above
• Not sufficiently considering the Commission’s money laundering and terrorist financing risk assessment or the Commission’s guidance
• Not ensuring its policies, procedures and controls were implemented effectively, for example not following its own policy to request source of funds information from customers who had deposited and lost £10,000 in a 12-month period.”

Further, this latest action against In Touch Games follows that of regulatory action taken by the Gambling Commission in 2019 against the operator and also in 2021. On both occasions, In Touch Games had to make 7 figure settlements.

Commenting on the latest action announced this morning by the UK, Executive Director of Operations Kay Roberts said: “Considering this operator’s history of failings we expected to see significant improvement when we carried out our planned compliance assessment. Disappointingly, although many improvements had been made, there was still more to do.”

“This £6.1m fine shows that we will take escalating enforcement action where failures are repeated and all licensees should be acutely aware of this.”

Dave Sawyer @Casinomeister

Dave has been involved in the Online Gambling industry for 20 odd years now. With experience working for an operator based in Gibraltar, where he headed up the IT team at Ladbrokes, to running his own iGaming affiliate websites until 2019.

Dave now writes for Casinomeister and sister site Casino Gazette. You may also see him on the forum from time to time, where he goes by the handle Webzcas.