Caesars Entertainment Smacked with a £13m Fine for Grave Offences

Casino giant Caesars Entertainment Corp is the latest gaming industry player to face the wrath of the no-nonsense UK watchdog, the United Kingdom Gambling Commission. Caesars has been slammed with a hefty £13 million fine by the UK Gambling Commission for a series of responsible gaming and AML violations; it the largest fine yet in the history of land-based casinos.

Caesars Infringements

The gaming company was hit with the £13m penalty after the operator was found guilty of a range of outrageous offences in an inquiry of activities between January 2016 and December 2018. Some of the most damning violations that the Commission exposed comprised of the following;

Social Responsibility Failures

• Insufficient interaction with a customer known to have previously been in self-exclusion and incurred a loss of £240,000 over 13 months.
• A customer was allowed to continue playing and ended up losing a total of £18,000 within a year. She had identified herself as a self-employed nanny to Caesar’s staff, indicating that her savings were exhausted and that she was borrowing more money from family and using an overdraft facility to bankroll her problematic gambling activities.
• Another customer was incompetently handled after he identified himself as a retired postman and had already lost over £15,000 in just 44 days.
• Insufficient interaction with a customer who lost £323,000 over a 12-month duration; the said player had already shown signs of compulsive gambling in 30 sessions which topped five hours each time.

Anti-Money Laundering Failures:

• Failure to carry out sufficient source of funds checks on a customer who was allowed to stake about £3.5 million and lost a whopping £1.6 million over a 3-month duration
• The operator failed to obtain enough evidence of source of funds for a politically exposed person who incurred a loss of £795,000 after 13 months
• Caesar’s staff never bothered to perform ECDD (Enhanced Customer Due Diligence) checks on a player who lost over £240,000 in 13 months
• Another customer who identified herself as a waitress, was not subjected to a source of funds checks and was allowed to cash-in £87,000 and lost £15,000 in just one year.

Three of Caesars Senior Managers Have Already Lost Their Licenses

As we speak, three senior managers of Caesars have already surrendered their licenses after they were directly linked to the gross violations. The Commission is still probing the remaining Personal Management License holders with the hopes of exposing any more managers responsible.

Following the penalty, Neil McArthur, the current CEO of the UK Gambling Commission, warned about the severity of Caesar’s infractions and urged the operators to put the safety of the customers first.

Caesars is not the First and will Certainly not be the Last

The stern action against Caesars is the latest in line of strict regulatory action by the UKGC. Since January, the Commission has suspended operating licenses of several gaming corporations including Multi-Media Entertainments Limited, Addison Global Limited and Stakers Limited.

Up to now, perpetrators have paid over £27 million in penalty bundles, including £11.6 million and £3 million paid by Betway and Mr Green Respectively. The silver lining of all this is that money paid out in penalties will be redirected towards national efforts in reducing the harms of problem gambling. Better yet, operators will be more mindful of how they handle their clientele.