Money Laundering And The Gambling Industry

With a bookmaker being ordered to pay millions for failing to prevent money laundering, Nicola Sharp and Syedur Rahman examine how the gambling industry can tackle the problem.

Bookmaker William Hill has been ordered to pay £6.2M for what the Gambling Commission called systemic failures regarding money laundering.

The Commission has ruled that the bookmaker breached anti-money laundering and social responsibility regulations between 2014 and 2016. A lack of proper checks meant that ten customers were able to deposit large sums of money that were the proceeds of criminal offences. These payments led to gains for William Hill of around £1.2M. But the bookmaker is now having to pay that back, plus a £5M penalty.

The Gambling Commission has stated that William Hill was guilty of a systemic failing. This failing related to not making proper checks about the origins of the money and not establishing that the people using it to bet were problem gamblers.

How bookmakers make checks to determine if customers are problem gamblers is another article that can be written by someone else. Here, we will concentrate on William Hill's failure to identify the huge sums being placed as bets by these people as the proceeds of crime.

The betting was either an attempt to launder the money - to make it harder to identify as cash that had been obtained through criminal activity - or simply the people who had gained it through crime spending it for their...