SBC News Voice of the Sports Betting Industry
Corbett Bookmakers has run afoul of the UK Gambling Commission (UKGC) due to anti-money laundering (AML) and social responsibility failures.
The independent retail bookmaker has been issued a £686,070 penalty by the regulator after a two-day assessment found evidence of licensing breaches.
Corbett operates a small chain of high-street betting shops, owning 36 in total with most of its properties located in Wales but with a substantial amount also based in England, particularly in the North West region.
The UKGC enforcement shows that the regulator is not shying away from penalising operators big and small for licensing failures. The Commission broke UK records in recent years with successive actions against Entain and William Hill, which were issued penalties of £17m and £19.2m respectively in 2022 and 2023.
Commenting on the action against Corbett, John Pierce, UKGC Director of Enforcement, said: “This operator has failed to adhere to vital regulations designed to make gambling safer and free from criminal activity.
“As a result, it will not only pay a significant fine but also undergo a rigorous audit to ensure full compliance with anti-money laundering and safer gambling measures.”
What did Corbett do?
As stated above, like most operators which face enforcement actions from the Commission, Corbett’s licensing breaches have been divided into social responsibility failures and AML failures.
The former saw the firm fail to identify and interact with customers who staked and lost significant amounts during a short period of time. UK licences require operators to engage customers who are seen doing this as a form of gambling harm prevention and reduction.
In Corbett’s case, the UKGC accuses the firm of failing to identify a customer who staked £23,674 in a 13-day period as being at risk of gambling harm, while also failing to ‘adequately interact’ with two customers who lost £3,252 in four hours and £6,741 over 10 weeks respectively.
On AML, the UKGC concluded that Corbett had been allowing customers to stake and lose significant sums without sufficient KYC taking place. The firm’s AML and CTF risk assessment was also judged to have ‘failed to consider the full scope of customer, product geographic and payment risks’.
As well as receiving the £686,070 fine for the breaches, which took place between February 2022 and May 2024, the operator will also have to undergo a third party audit of its AML and safer gambling policies, procedures and controls.
“In addition to the remedial actions already taken, we expect the operator to swiftly and fully implement the audit recommendations, demonstrating clear and measurable improvements in both policy and practice,” the UKGC’s Pierce concluded.
“Failure to do so will prompt our compliance team to reassess the situation and take further action as necessary.”
