White label providers to pay £675,000 settlement after AML failings

Jumpman Gaming, which operates 243 websites, and Progress Play, which runs 201, have been ordered to pay £500,000 and £175,718 respectively, in lieu of financial penalties.

Both sums will be directed to the National Strategy to Reduce Gambling Harms.

In addition to this, Jumpman Gaming will pay £13,594 and Progress Play will contribute £12,466 towards the Commission’s investigations costs.

The Commission launched an investigation into Jumpman Gaming in September 2020, after concerns were raised during a compliance assessment in July that year.

The investigation found that Jumpman Gaming did not have appropriate measures in place to protect against money laundering and terrorist financing.

This was in relation to how the operator’s policies and controls seemed to conflate source of wealth and source of funds, and how guidance for employees to conduct customer due diligence was not detailed enough.

The operator also acknowledged that a money laundering and terrorist financing risk assessment it had carried out was insufficient.

Jumpman Gaming also permitted customers to deposit and lose “well in excess of the average UK income” before purposeful reviews were undertaken. Furthermore, its customers were allowed to gamble “at a high velocity” after spending significant amounts of money.

One Jumpman Gaming customer lost over £15,000 in less than one month, with no affordability checks taken. A total of £11,000 of this was lost in two days during the peak of the Covid-19 lockdown.

Progress Play was also found to have committed anti-money laundering and terrorist financing failings, along with customer interaction failings.

The Commission launched its investigation into Progress Play in August 2020.

It found that after the operator requested information on customers’ source of funds – which customers had 14 days to provide – they were allowed to gamble for the entire two-week period.

In addition Progress Play did not comply with its own source of funds policy, when customer activity triggered it.

Further, Progress Play breached customer interaction conditions by not conducting affordability checks on customers that had triggered gambling harm thresholds.

The Commission also found that VIPs may have received pay incentives to partake in bonus offers and promotions, violating the Commission’s guidance on not offering bonuses to customers that display signs of gambling harm.

“We will always clamp down on operators who fail in their obligations to keep gambling safe and crime-free,” said Leanne Oxley, director of enforcement and intelligence at the Gambling Commission.

“We encourage other operators to consider the failings identified in these cases carefully, and consider what improvements they can make in their own businesses.”

In March the Commission issued a fine of £3.15m to Camelot after a number of failings were identified in the Camelot-operated National Lottery app.