Betfred will pay more than £800,000 in compensation after a gambler managed to spend nearly £1m of stolen cash with the bookmaker.
The Gambling Commission found Betfred had failed on anti-money laundering procedures in key areas.
The Commission launched an investigation into the Salford bookmaker after a former accountant, Matthew Stevens, gambled away huge sums of stolen money with the firm.
Stevens, from Leeds, was jailed for three years and four months after admitting stealing £856,703.80 from his boss to fund an online gaming habit.
He spent the vast proportion of his stolen cash on Betfred.com between 2013 and 2015.
But the report found Betfred staff did not check Stevens’ background thoroughly enough: they believed he was professional gambler and did not investigate where the money was coming from.
“The customer was a high spending customer”, says the report, “gambling remotely, and as such presented a higher risk of money laundering which Betfred should have recognised.
“Despite the risk presented, Betfred did not take sufficient steps to identify the source or legitimacy of the customer’s funds.”
Stevens quickly became one of the firm’s top spenders and was given ‘VIP’ status.
Because he knew the lingo and was familiar with the trade, staff believed Stevens had won his fortune with another betting chain.
This was only based on the opinion of staff and was never investigated.
When Stevens started to lose significant sums, Betfred did not step in.
“After being upgraded to a VIP customer, the customer’s play was not subject to the reactive player monitoring which applied to other customers,” it said.
Betfred also awarded Stevens bonuses of over £1,000 when his balance reached zero.
But the Commission criticised Betfred for not checking up on the and for having an over-simplistic and inaccurate view of money laundering”.
Under the terms of the settlement, £443,000 of the £800,000 fine will go to the victims of the criminal activity and £344,500 will be paid to good causes.
The bookmakers chain was started in Ordsall in 1967 by Salford businessman Fred Done.
It is now headquartered in Warrington and has over 1,300 branches nationwide.
Richard Watson, Programme Director at the Commission, said: “We identified a number of weaknesses in the anti-money laundering and social responsibility controls used by Betfred. The penalty package of over £800,000 reflects these failures.”
Main image by Ian Sutton via Flickr
