A case was brought on Craig, a YouTube star with 1.3 Million followers, and his partner Dylan. The judge considered their crime “very grave” and ordered them to pay £174,000 and £91,000 respectively.
“I made a huge mistake. I did some things wrong. I was very naïve … And very arrogant,” said Douglas at the end of it all.
Accepting stolen money from gambler cost Betfred £800,000
An accountant embezzled more than £800,000 from his employer over a 13-month period to fuel his gambling habit, spending most of it at Betfred.
The case was referred to the commission over claims made in court that Betfred staff offered the convicted thief free bets and days out to go gambling, despite him racking up huge losses between 2013 and 2015.
The Gibraltar based gambling company was found to have failed to meet its obligations on social responsibility and the prevention of money laundering. They were ordered to pay £443,000 to victims of the said player and further £344,500 to socially responsible causes.
The accountant-turned-gambler was jailed for 3 years and 4 months.
Gala coral paid £880,000 for failing to inquire about a player
A gambler posed as a man of wealth to Gala Coral, got treated as a ‘VIP’ while the bookmaking company relieved him of hundreds of thousands of pounds over 3 years. Little did they know that the money this VIP gambler was blowing up came to him from stealing from a vulnerable person.
The Gambling Commission inquired into the matter, found that Gala Coral had not done sufficient background checks on the sources of this person’s funds, had ignored glaring red flags, and continued to profit from his insatiable gambling habit.
Gala Coral was ordered to pay £846,664 to the victim of this theft and his family and £30,000 to the commission to cover their investigation costs.
The total fine added up to less than a day’s worth of Gala Coral’s takings in 2015.
William Hill Group (WHG) fined £6 million for breaching anti-money laundering (AML)
WHG’s failure to follow background check processes resulted in at least ten customers being able to use stolen money, or money that may be the proceeds of crime, to gamble in various periods between November 2014 and June 2017.
The investigation established that the source of the customers’ funds included substantial thefts from employers following breaches of trust, fraud offenses involving elderly victims, and money laundering offenses.
One particular customer’s £653,000 deposit over a 18-month period had activated an alert, which WHG executives decided to ignore and continued taking his bets. Another customer whose deposits and escalating losses was spotted by WHG’s systems. But the only action it generated was sending two automated social responsibility emails.
Systemic senior management failure to protect consumers and prevent money laundering resulted in WHG paying a penalty package of at least £6.2m.
‘Fixing’ the software lands father-son in jail
A 60-year old Delhi resident and his Canada-educated software engineer son were arrested by the Mumbai Cyber Police for cheating people through their online gaming websites that were accumulating over Rs 200 Crores every year.
They came to the police’s attention when 9 people were arrested for running online gambling linked to apps created by the father-son duo. The gambling app ran on a software that made sure that none of the numbers customers bet on ever won. The duo was running the operation across 7 states and 15 countries.
Now they are in jail.
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