Betfred is to pay £900,000 penalty after a UK Gambling Commission investigation revealed social responsibility failures. 

Petfre (Gibraltar) Limited – which runs betfred.com – will pay the money as part of a settlement with the Commission. The Commission launched an investigation after a compliance assessment revealed social responsibility failures within the business’s policies and procedures.

Failures included:  not having sufficient processes in place to identify indicators of harm such as spend, time spent gambling and patterns of spend by utilising automated processes.

Not having processes in place to ensure immediate and automated action was taken to minimise harm where strong indicators of harm were identified.

Deploying a process which meant that when a customer’s account was flagged for a safer gambling review they would not be flagged for a further review for seven days.

This resulted in customers exhibiting further indicators of harm not being interacted with as promptly as they should have been, and in one instance a consumer lost £17,900 within 24 hours without an additional interaction. 

John Pierce, Commission Director of Enforcement, said: “Diligent implementation of effective policies and procedures are the cornerstones of safer gambling in Britain.

“The Commission found that Petfre didn’t have sufficiently effective procedures in place, meaning some customers displaying markers of harm were not contacted quickly enough.

“While the gaps we identified were unacceptable, the licensee acted swiftly to implement interim mitigating controls to address our immediate concerns. They have since delivered an appropriate action plan and taken significant steps to assure the Commission that their current operating model meets our requirements.

“The failure to implement an effective monitoring framework to identify and contact consumers at risk of harm at pace has resulted in a significant regulatory settlement.

“We expect all operators to learn from this case and read the public statement to ensure they do not make the same mistakes.”