Grosvenor Casinos owner to pay £5m after watchdog finds gambling failures
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Three casino operators owned by Rank Group will pay £5 million after the gambling watchdog found a series of due diligence failures, including around a customer using crypto assets to gamble.
The Gambling Commission said Grosvenor Casinos Limited, Grosvenor Casinos (GC) Limited and Gaming Group Limited run 51 casinos across Britain. They are owned by Rank Group, a FTSE-listed business which also runs Mecca bingo halls and online casinos.
The regulator’s investigation into the venues identified failures to meet anti-money laundering and social responsibility duties.
This included having unclear policies, procedures and controls which resulted in inappropriate risk levels being ascribed to high-risk customers and high-risk sources of funds being used without appropriate scrutiny, the review found.
It used examples of records showing a customer using cryptocurrency assets as a source of their funds, and a customer identified as a student from China, neither of whom were ascribed higher than the standard risk levels.
In these cases, enhanced due diligence checks should have been carried out, according to the Gambling Commission.
It also identified instances where staff did not have safer gambling interactions with customers at risk of experiencing harm.
An example included a long-standing customer who won about £260,000 in a short space of time then lost about £250,000 in 12 days, without safer gambling interactions being recorded.
Sue Young, the Gambling Commission’s executive director of operations, said: “We would advise all premises-based operators to take a careful look at this case and ensure their own business is not making the same mistakes and, therefore, they do not face costly and inevitable commission action.”
